The Internet Axolotl's Tub

[odinsblog]

🗣️THIS IS WHAT INCLUSIVE, COMPASSIONATE DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE

Minnesota Dems enacted a raft of laws to make the state a trans refuge, and ensure people receiving trans care here can't be reached by far-right governments in places like Florida and Texas. (link)

Minnesota Dems ensured that everyone, including undocumented immigrants, can get drivers' licenses. (link)

They made public college free for the majority of Minnesota families. (link)

Minnesota Dems dropped a billion dollars into a bevy of affordable housing programs, including by creating a new state housing voucher program. (link)

Minnesota Dems massively increased funding for the state's perpetually-underfunded public defenders, which lets more public defenders be hired and existing public defenders get a salary increase. (link)

Dems raised Minnesota education spending by 10%, or about 2.3 billion. (link)

Minnesota Dems created an energy standard for 100% carbon-free electricity by 2040. (link)

Minnesota already has some of the strongest election infrastructure (and highest voter participation) in the country, but the legislature just made it stronger, with automatic registration, preregistration for minors, and easier access to absentee ballots. (link)

Minnesota Dems expanded the publicly subsidized health insurance program to undocumented immigrants. This one's interesting because it's the sort of things Dems often balk at. The governor opposed it! The legislature rolled over him and passed it anyway. (link)

Minnesota Dems expanded background checks and enacted red-flag laws, passing gun safety measures that the GOP has thwarted for years. (link)

Minnesota Dems gave the state AG the power to block the huge healthcare mergers that have slowly gobbled up the state's medical system. (link)

Minnesota Dems restored voting rights to convicted felons as soon as they leave prison. (link)

Minnesota Dems made prison phone calls free. (link)

Minnesota Dems passed new wage protection rules for the construction industry, against industry resistance. (link)

Minnesota Dems created a new sales tax to fund bus and train lines, an enormous victory for the sustainability and quality of public transit. Transit be more pleasant to ride, more frequent, and have better shelters, along more lines. (link)

They passed strict new regulations on PFAS ("forever chemicals"). (link)

Minnesota Dems passed the largest bonding bill in state history! Funding improvements to parks, colleges, water infrastructure, bridges, etc. etc. etc. (link)

They're going to build a passenger train from the Twin Cities to Duluth. (link)

I can't even find a news story about it but there's tens of millions in funding for new BRT lines, too. (link)

A wonky-but-important change: Minnesota Dems indexed the state gas tax to inflation, effectively increasing the gas tax. (link)

They actually indexed a bunch of stuff to inflation, including the state's education funding formula, which helps ensure that school spending doesn't decline over time. (link)

Minnesota Dems made hourly school workers (e.g., bus drivers and paraprofessionals) eligible for unemployment during summer break, when they're not working or getting paid. (link)

Minnesota Dems passed a bunch of labor protections for teachers, including requiring school districts to negotiate class sizes as part of union contracts. (Yet another @SydneyJordanMN special here. (link)

Minnesota Dems created a state board to govern labor standards at nursing homes. (link)

Minnesota Dems created a Prescription Drug Affordability Board, which would set price caps for high-cost pharmaceuticals. (link)

Minnesota Dems created new worker protections for Amazon warehouse workers and refinery workers. (link)

Minnesota Dems passed a digital fair repair law, which requires electronics manufacturers to make tools and parts available so that consumers can repair their electronics rather than purchase new items. (link)

Minnesota Dems made Juneteenth a state holiday. (link)

Minnesota Dems banned conversion therapy. (link)

They spent nearly a billion dollars on a variety of environmental programs, from heat pumps to reforestation. (link)

Minnesota Dems expanded protections for pregnant and nursing workers - already in place for larger employers - to almost everyone in the state. (link)

Minnesota Dems created a new child tax credit that will cut child poverty by about a quarter. (link)

Minnesota Democrats dropped a quick $50 million into homelessness prevention programs. (link)

And because the small stuff didn't get lost in the big stuff, they passed a law to prevent catalytic converter thefts. (link)

Minnesota Dems increased child care assistance. (link)

Minnesota Dems banned "captive audience meetings," where employers force employees to watch anti-union presentations. (link)

No news story yet, but Minnesota Dems forced signal priority changes to Twin Cities transit. Right now the trains have to wait at intersections for cars, which, I can say from experience, is terrible. Soon that will change.

Minnesota Dems provided the largest increase to nursing home funding in state history. (link)

They also bumped up salaries for home health workers, to help address the shortage of in-home nurses. (link)

Minnesota Dems legalized drug paraphernalia, which allows social service providers to conduct needle exchanges and address substance abuse with reduced fear of incurring legal action. (link)

Minnesota Dems banned white supremacists and extremists from police forces, capped probation at 5 years for most crimes, improved clemency, and mostly banned no-knock warrants. (link)

Minnesota Dems also laid the groundwork for a public health insurance option. (link)

I’m happy for the people of Minnesota, but as a Floridian living under Ron DeSantis & hateful Republicans, I’m also very envious tbh. We know that democracy can work, and this is a shining example of what government could be like in the hands of legislators who actually care about helping people in need, and not pursuing the GOP’s “culture wars” and suppressing the votes of BIPOC, and inflicting maximum harm on those who aren’t cis/het, white, wealthy, Christian males. BRAVO MINNESOTA. This is how you do it. 👏🏿👏🏿👏🏿👏🏿👏🏿👏🏿👏🏿

👉🏿 https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1660846689450688514.html

[hinekoakahi]

@thebibliosphere y'all are in Minnesota, right, or did I remember that wrong?

[thebibliosphere]

Yep! It's been staggering to watch what our Dems are pushing through at the moment. Staggering and hopeful.

[axlotl9]

No captive audience meetings, huh? I can think of at least one company that is going to have to change its new employee orientation because of this. (Home Depot includes an anti-union segment in its onboarding video. This is not surprising, given that Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank started Home Depot after being fired from Happy Dan’s Hardware (where they were CEO and CFO, respectively) for creating an off-the-books slush fund for anti-union activities. It’s also the reason the company was incorporated in Georgia, a “right to work” state, despite the fact that they were resident in California at the time.)

[nava-you-mind-that]

[axlotl9]

Definite mood.

[albertserra]

and what about it.

[zarohk]

When you could be watching She-Ra or something actively and openly LGBTQ+ friendly.

[albertserra]

oh shut the fuck up

[monstrousgourmandizingcats]

#can’t believe people in 1956 were watching johnny guitar instead of she-ra#🙄🙄smh

[indieninja92]

im fucking dying what the hell kind of noxious fart gas do u have to have instead of brains to fucking comment something like that 😂

im just i dont even know where to begin, between the foolishness of forgetting that queer people predate the she-ra reboot and the blatant disinterest in hearing the experiences of queer people in different contexts and the fact that maybe just maybe we dont exclusively want to watch Certified Gay media and that queer reading is a way of actively engaging in the art u consume and validating urself and etc etc… im dying, what a mook 😂

[amuseoffyre]

It must be so strange for kids now to wrap their head around how little representation there was back in the day. And what we did get was generally bad - if you were any kind of queer character, you were either murdered or a murderer who deserved to die. No in between. It really did a number on generations of queer people, seeing ourselves presented that way.

If you want to talk animated queer characters, up into the Disney Renaissance and beyond, the only queer-coded characters you ever saw were the villains.  Hell, in the Beauty and the Beast reboot, they gave us “a confirmed gay character” who was apparently LeFou, Gaston’s side-kick. I say apparently, because have you watched the film?

I can only think of one mainstream film I saw from the 80s that had any positive queer representation while studying film at uni and it was tangled up in a savage critique of racism, culturalism and Thatcher’s Britain.

Things are better now, yes, but let’s not forget where they started. Let’s not forget how far we’ve come and how far we still need to go.

[saint-batrick]

ellen is garbage, but when she came out on her TV show (april 30th, 1997. i was fifteen.) it was national news. for months.

a year and a half later, matthew shepard was beaten, tortured and left to die, because he was gay. his death was also national news - but more importantly, his murder is what led to gay bashing being legally declared a hate crime. i was sixteen years old and had been with my then-girlfriend for almost a year. assaulting, raping, and killing us for being queer wouldn’t have been prosecuted as a hate crime.

i could go on for so, so long but this is already pushing me close to tears.

“you could be watching she-ra” my god. you know, i did watch she-ra when i was a kid.

i didn’t see myself in any of them.

[vaspider]

I am 43 years old. The first time I remember seeing a lesbian couple kiss on television that wasn’t porn or immediately leading into deaths meant to demonstrate that lesbianism would immediately destroy your lives (within the next 90 minutes!) was The Body, a Buffy episode which aired on February 27, 2001.

I was 24. My daughter was an infant. I’d never seen anything like it before. Here I was! There! On screen. I identified with dorky, awkward, very gay Tara so much.

And then you know what happened just over a year after we finally saw Willow and Tara kiss, having been denied for seasons because the network wouldn’t let them?

Whedon fucking killed Tara off in the most ridiculous, pointless way possible, right after Tara and Willow, who had broken up, got back together.

My “good, meaningful, actually changed my fucking life” representation still followed the horrible tropes. That’s how hungry we were. That’s how desperate we were. We still pointed back to Willow & Tara as ‘this is the best we’ve gotten,’ even though she literally got shot through the heart, somehow, randomly, with a stray bullet the morning after she and her girlfriend have make-up sex and get back together.

Fuck.

[carolxdanvers]

I think this is very indicative of a cultural divide between even mid-millennials and gen z. I graduated high school in 2007. My middle and high school years were filled with people drawing explicit, realistic images of me, nude, with a penis. People writing slurs on my sidewalk with bleach, and when my family cleaned it before I saw it, they came back and wrote it with bleach in the grass, killing the grass and leaving me to see a slur every day when I walked outside, all because I had cut my hair short and I wasn’t allowed to shave my legs. I didn’t even know I was into women at the time.

And one of the boys who led the most vicious attacks on me came out as gay in 2006. He was met with support from a lot of the students who had treated me like a blight on the world because they assumed I was a lesbian. The only LGBT person I’d seen in film was Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs. Real great representation. I was afraid to watch Xena because if anyone from my school found out, I’d be beaten to hell in the locker room - like I already was, on accusations of staring at their boobs.

And a few years later, after tireless work by a lot of very exhausted people and cringey PSAs like Hillary Duff’s “when you call something gay, do you realize what you say” campaign, queerphobia began to be seen as the bigotry it always was. A few years ago, my niece came out and started dating a girl at her high school, and I cannot tell you the terror that filled me for her safety. She, blessedly, lives in a very different world than I did when I was her age.

So when people scoff at barely-there representation, or representation that existed entirely within the minds of the people watching the movie, and when people laugh at the idea of now-antiquated slurs like “fruit” and “poofer”, to me that is partly a victory. It is a comfort to know that people younger than me have a more accepting world than it was 15, 20, 30 years ago.

But it is also deeply insulting that people who never faced what others did, will pass condemnation on those others for accepting scraps and crumbs. It’s like eating three meals a day and laughing at Depression era soup recipes of ketchup and water. “Or you could just buy some Campbell’s or something with any nutritional content, smh”

[axlotl9]

And, of course, under the Hays Code (written by a Catholic priest and enforced by Joseph Bremen, a board member of the Catholic League of Decency), homosexuality was *forbidden* to be portrayed in a positive way.

It was banned under two rules (no positive portrayal of criminal acts/criminal acts must always have consequences, and no positive representation of “perversions”.

So for 30 years, there was literally no way to get any positive gay representation in Hollywood movies unless it was heavily, heavily obscured in symbolism. And even after the Code was scrapped and the modern ratings system put in place, the old attitudes held over within the studio system.

So yeah, “Kill Your Gays” was pretty much a product of the Hays Code.

[howdywrites]

I'm worried about the next electricity bill bound to come in the next couple of weeks 😃 folks are getting charged like $9000 per megawatt. Fuck the Texas officials who got us into this mess

[howdywrites]

Some folks are getting $25,000-$100,000 bills just from having electricity some of the time this past week holy shit

[howdywrites]

If you are a Texan facing price gouging from ANY company, please watch this video!

This includes electric companies, water and gas companies, hotels/inns you had to stay at due to the weather and groceries selling necessities!!

[howdywrites]

And while we're here, if youd like to see direct action for holding Ted Cruz responsible for his failure to serve his state, you can do it with a simple text!

TEXT: PJENDN to 50409 to send a prewritten letter to your representatives!

[axlotl9]

At first glance I thought that said PENDEJO and I figured that was appropriate.

[judasisgayriot]

The breadsticks thing to me is hilarious I think it must be another Europe/America thing bc my whole life ‘breadsticks’ have been these hard crunchy thin stick things you buy them at the supermarket and it says breadsticks on the box Never in my life has anyone around me referred to an actual stick of bread as a breadstick lmao But then we don’t have Olive Garden either

[newblogisnotjustanoxymoron-deac]

wait, that’s not what they’re talking about?

[wildwood-faun]

Are you telling me this meme is not about grissini? My life is a lie!

[stammsternenstaub]

WHAT

[entomancy]

I… did wonder why there would be such a focus on going to somewhere with unlimited dry wheat twigs.  Googling ‘olive garden breadsticks’ does seem to suggest a tastier thing.

Huh.

[crumplelush]

this changes everything

[little-fleur-deactivated2015103]

I mean, I thought it was odd that they everyone was so excited about breadsticks… but then I thought, well, it’s America…

[lachatblanche]

Wait they’re talking about actual bread???

[kernezelda]

grissini:

breadsticks:

[cyanwrites]

… I want American breadsticks. ;_;

[shanology]

@goodbyecassiel - this is the Great Breadstick Misunderstanding, companion to the Epic Lemonade Confusion post

[accursedvoid]

@charlottedabookworm my life is a lie

[charlottedabookworm]

Omfg same

wtaf why did nobody ever tell us they were talking about actual bread?!?!

[garrettauthor]

We literally did tell you. We. We used the word BREAD.

[ardent-ace]

but………… those aren’t breadsticks!

[garrettauthor]

They are sticks.

Of bread.

🤷‍♂️

[crewdlydrawn-deactivated2022072]

We didn’t know you had breadtwigs instead.

[defectivegembrain]

OH the joke is funnier than previously thought because those are bigger and therefore it would be harder and more socially awkward to shove them into your purse! Lol

[runcibility]

I feel like this is explaining a joke to Vulcans who are totally game to try humor, and I’m loving it.

[axlotl9]

American person here. I had no idea that there were “breadsticks” other than the grissini type.

Then again, I’ve never been to an Olive Garden.

[drdeath]

Fully and utterly obsessed with every single aspect of this scene

[wintersoldierfell]

#when you’re both gay and one of you is stuck at a family dinner so you plan an elaborate rescue mission

[kidspike13]

That car tho 🤣

[axlotl9]

That car was an early-60s kustom that made its way to Hollywood. NOT made by George Barris, unlike the Batmobile. Here it is in Star Trek:

It was called the Reactor, and was built by Gene Winfield.

And in Bewitched:

Gene Winfield was primarily a model maker and produced a lot of the props for Star Trek.

[dankmemeuniversity]

[axlotl9]

Well, what’s it to ya?

[casuallylawyering]

Can someone explain the whole Taxi Sqaud V. AHL Team set up ?

Are we not allowed to call guys up from Wilkes?

[kraznyoktyabr]

The “taxi squad” is a reserve squad that the teams are allowed to have in addition to their official roster. They are paid but their salaries don’t count against the cap. They travel with the team and practice with the team. Their numbers are limited - I believe the maximum number of players on the taxi squad is six (one full shift, essentially), including (mandatory) one goalie.

AHL players may only play a maximum number of games in a season before being considered part of the NHL roster. That number has not been announced for this shortened season yet.

The term “taxi squad” comes from the NFL where one of the owners of the Cleveland Browns in the 1940s also owned a taxi company, and he put the reserve players on the payroll of the taxi company so that they’d have a salary when they weren’t playing in games.

[casuallylawyering]

Thanks! I know how calling guys up from the AHL normally works but have they said if NHL teams can call guys up from the AHL still?

Like let’s say a team has a bunch of injuries can they still add players from their AHL team and do they have to quarantine before joining the NHL team ?

[axlotl9]

So if I’m reading what was laid out correctly, this “official” taxi squad is supposed to be in lieu of call ups from the AHL. They will be in the NHL bubble but being paid either an AHL salary (if on a two-way contract) or NHL minimum (if on a one-way contract). Any call ups from AHL would have to quarantine before entering the NHL bubble.

[bobcatmoran]

Favorite image of the day: A photo taken by Brett Cizek of a common merganser with a massive brood of over 50 ducklings trailing after her. Biologists guess that she picked up at least a couple dozen who got separated from their mother, and maybe a few more pre-hatching since ducks often lay a couple eggs in other ducks’ nests as a way of not…er…putting all their eggs in one basket. So big broods are not uncommon, but this is definitely larger than usual.

Apparently since this photo was taken, she’s picked up another two dozen and is now wandering around Bemidji, MN, with over 70 ducklings in tow.

[source] [source]

[axlotl9]

Ducky day care

[whitepeopletwitter]

[elfwreck]

And it was not, “one person left for work at 4 am, worked two jobs, returned home after 8pm entirely exhausted.”

No, it was “one person went to work at 8 or 9, came home at 5 or 6; ate food, paid bills, watched tv, celebrated birthdays with parties, and so on.”

And a couple-few times a year, they all went on a modest vacation, like a weekend visit to relatives in a nearby state and visited an amusement park while they were there. Also, in summer they went to the state fair - all 5 of them - maybe a couple of times. The went out to movies a couple times a month, but maybe not all 5 at once, because everyone wanted to see different movies.”

That wasn’t the exotic “livin’ the dream” lifestyle. That was the boring-humdrum what-everyone-does lifestyle.

(It was never “everyone.” But it wasn’t the rare 1%, either.) It was what showed up on all the tv sitcoms and drama shows because it was so common, you could use it as a backdrop without explaining anything.

[axlotl9]

Personal anecdote:

My maternal grandfather never finished high school. (He had to drop out and get a job when my great-grandfather ran out on the family.)

My mother is the youngest of six children, born over a ten-year span.

Grandpa didn’t fight in World War II although he tried to enlist, to the point of obtaining a fake birth certificate claiming he was younger than his actual age (33 in 1941.) Because he worked in a steel mill (and already had five kids - my mother was born during the war) he was considered an “essential worker”. The mill he worked for was one of the primary suppliers for the Kaiser shipyards in Richmond (now part of Rosie the Riveter National Park), so he made his contribution to the war effort.

My grandparents were never what one would call rich (grandma’s family had been wealthy but lost it all in the Depression), but they still:

Owned a large home (four bedrooms, one 1/2 bathrooms - the half bath being constructed by Grandpa after they moved in, as eight people in a house with one bathroom didn’t fly.)

Owned two cars at a time when most families had just one (Grandma was a good driver - the year before she married Grandpa, she and her sister drove across the United States to visit their grandparents in Boston. And by “they” I mean “she” - according to my mother, her aunt never learned to drive.)

Were able to take two weeks vacation every year - mostly within California while the kids were at home, and always driving, but still...

Admittedly, my mother was the only one of her siblings to go to college without government aid (all five of her siblings did some form of military service to fund college), yet all of them did go to college. Despite not finishing high school, Grandpa was a voracious reader who had a personal library almost as large as my paternal grandparents, both of whom were college professors.

Were there things that reflected the fact that they were careful with money? Certainly. At Christmas it became a running joke among my cousins as to how many times a given piece of wrapping paper might reappear, as they saved the wrapping every year. The last new car they bought was in 1964. (If I’m recalling correctly, they only ever bought two new cars - most of the cars my mother remembers from growing up were used cars that Grandpa fixed up.) Grandpa had his shop in back of the house where he could repair just about anything (his first job as a high school dropout had been as a mechanic.) and would do so until something was so worn that no amount of repair could fix it.

Could someone under those circumstances end up living in the same level of comfort today? I very much doubt it.

[bluehawk54]

HOW DO YOU LET THIS HAPPEN LOL

[axlotl9]

“Move fast, break things.”

[axlotl9]

Pretty good response to tonight’s political circus.

[darklynoon-deactivated20170407]

Reblog if you’re 30 or older

This is an experiment to see if there really are as few of us as people think.You can also use this to freak out your followers who think you’re 25 or something. Yay!

[gobblechopstv]

[40ouncesandamule]

The face Milhouse made haunted me for years. I don’t know what it is about that grimace that branded itself upon me but… it stuck. It stuck with me for years.

Even now, I feel a certain coldness

[ilovecats4ever]

because its based on this picture of a French man watching the Nazis march into Paris in 1940

[brucejennergang]

I wonder what kind of face that guy would make seeing Arabs and Africans march into Paris over the last decade.

[glamourweaver]

Well he was probably pretty happy when the De Gaulle’s Free French Army, made up of around 60% black and arab African colonial soldiers, marched into France via the Normandy invasion.

[axlotl9]

Of course, if you’ve ever seen photos or newsreel footage of the Liberation of Paris (76 years ago today!), you won’t see a single African or Arab soldier in the victory parade.

Why? Because the US Army was segregated, and the Powers That Be were worried that if the Black soldiers in our army saw black soldiers fighting as equals in the French army, they might mutiny. (There were also concerns about how such footage might be received on the home front, especially in the South.)

So Eisenhower browbeat de Gaulle into leaving all the colored troops out of the victory parade, instead dressing white US and British soldiers in French uniforms and having them parade for the cameras.

[glumshoe]

every few months someone explains to me what “GNU Terry Pratchett” means and then I immediately forget

it’s a vicious cycle

[knowledgefulbutterfly]

ok, but like what does it mean ?

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

For people who are wondering, it comes from the book Going Postal, one of the Discworld series.

The book features 'the Clacks' a sort of primitive telegraph system run from high towers that Terry Pratchett descibed as "sort of what the internet would be, if all you had was a lot of bits of string" (I'm paraphrasing here from what I remember from the intro to the film). Messages are sent from one tower to another using flashing lights in morse code, until they reach a tower within walking distance of the people they are meant for.

The people who own the business are so set on providing The Best (and most expensive) Service, that they refuse to stop the machinery so as to allow time for maintenance or proper breaks for the workers, leading to multiple people falling to their deaths due to exhaustion/poorly maintained towers. The actual plot of the book is about an ex-conman trying to rebuild the historic city post-office, so as to destroy the Clacks company's monopoly on long distance communication.

Thing is, whenever a Clacks worker dies on the job, the Clacksmen (and women) have a tradition called 'sending home', where the person's name is sent through all the towers, ending at the one closest to their home. The exception is John Dearheart, the son of the man who invented the Clacks system originally (and then had it stolen from under his nose), whose death is rumoured to have been a murder at the hands of his employers.

His name is sent around along with the code 'GNU', which is a signal to the Clacksworkers recieving it that they are meant to always send it on to the next tower, whatever happens. The idea is that, since a person is said to only truly die the last time their name is spoken, if John Dearheart's name is constantly being 'spoken' by the Clacks Tower mechanisms, then he's not really dead.

After Sir Terry's death, fans picked up the idea. GNU Terry Pratchett essentially just means 'remember Terry Pratchett'. You're meant reply with the same, so as to ensure that the name never stops being spoken, and so he lives on.

[botherbother-blog]

Soooo GNU Terry Pratchett

[amemait]

GNU Terry Pratchett

[kraznyoktyabr]

GNU Terry Pratchett

[axlotl9]

GNU Pterry

[atomictiki]

Just a sec. Gotta log into GMail

[the-x-button]

what the fuck

[autumngracy]

WHAT

[thesylverlining]

Garfield Lore goes DEEP

[image-transcribing-bot]

”1M with cattitude C o r (gg *» “ 1”* @#-mail «-~ (’ Login to Garfield’s G-maill! User Name: Password: m a Looking for a Garfield E-mail address? You’ve come to the right place! This is where you can get your E-mail for free. Here you get a E-mail box with a Garfield address. First Name: Last Name: © 1997-00 Commtouch Software Incorporated. All rights reserved lIIIIIIIIIIbm

I am an image transcribing bot which uses Tesseract OCR to translate images to text. I’m far from perfect but I try my best! Your murder won’t last forever ^_^ | PayPal | Patreon

[rosethevoid]

WHAT THE EVERLIVING FUCK? YOU’RE FUCKING TELLING ME GMAIL.COM USED TO BE A FUCKING GARFIELD THEMED EMAIL SERVICE!? WHAT THE FUCK!? GOOGLE WHAT THE FUCK!? MY WHOLE LIFE IS CRASHING DOWN AROUND ME

EDIT: I JUST FUCKING LOOKED AT THE NOTES AND SOMEONE FUCKING SAID G IN GMAIL STANDS FOR GARFIELD FUCKING KILL ME……AHHHHHH

[axlotl9]

So... it was gmail.garfield.com, they never registered a domain gmail.com.

Kind of funny this post going viral today, given that it’s Garfield’s Birthday. The strip has now been running for 42 years.

[whitepeopletwitter]

[t3sticles]

Actually I think they’ll be ok 🙃

[doctorzorders]

Not everywhere is handling this as shittily as the US, ya dingus

[xanthera]

#this is important because we have to remember #we have to remember it *did not have to be as bad as it was*

[yumearashi]

New Zealand has now completely eradicated COVID-19 - no active cases and no new infections.  (They’re not alone - Iceland did it too.)  They are safe and back to normal life.  No more lock downs.  No more social distancing.  Stores, restaurants, public transportation - all fully reopened. Weddings, graduations, and birthday parties are once again being celebrated.  Their leaders are now shifting their focus to economic recovery.  And they achieved it with just 1,504 cases and 22 deaths reported nationally. 

Many have applauded the announcement, including Helen Clarke, a former prime minister of New Zealand, who posted on Twitter: “Clear leadership & an engaged public have produced this result.“

New Zealand had 0.45 deaths per 100,000 people, and a 1.5% fatality among COVID-19 cases.  By contrast, the US has had 35.05 deaths per 100,000 people and a 5.6% fatality among cases. [source]  And that’s just so far (6/13/20) - it will get worse, with the pandemic still raging and infections still spiking.  

I have seen too many people resigned to this dismal response as unquestionable fact, saying things like ‘there’s nothing to be done’ or ‘we just have to tough it out’ or ‘America’s had the best pandemic response in the world’.  One person asked me, ‘they’re doing everything they can, what more do you want?‘ This.  This is what I want.   Competent leadership that makes fact-based decisions and values expertise.  Strong leadership that values human life over money. Decisive leadership that acts to mitigate a crisis, not inflame it.

[axlotl9]

Of course, New Zealand just started letting people who were abroad when the pandemic started getting bad back into the country, and they still have to be quarantined for two weeks. Tourism isn’t happening anytime soon, either.

Still, good job, Kiwis!