itâs been said before and itâs not even close to the worst thing but it sucks how our current robber barons are such philistines. like these guys arenât even building libraries or concert halls. they canât even pretend to enjoy art, and they donât see any value in signaling that they appreciate art
this current batch of the fithy-rich is BORING. They're BORING. Oh you have a yacht that's bigger than anybody else's yacht but functionally no different from one of your fancy houses? BORING. You have yet another fast car? YAWN. You ate a burger but like, a special burger? whatever. FUND AN OPERA ABOUT ANOTHER RICH GUY YOU HATE, DIPSHITS. How about you put a concert hall with your name on it in every city in the US and fund their operations for the next decade, if you're so rich????? unless you're too poor to afford that????? How many people do you, personally, directly employ, and what are their salaries? Do you pay well enough to command the loyalty and willing service of any masters of their craft? It would be so easy to win the absolute love and adoration of the masses in this climate but no, they wanna build bunkers and play politics in order to save a few more miserable nickles.
one of the underrated lessons from lotr's Aragorn is to avoid responsibility for as long as humanly possible, possibly in the woods, possibly without showering, until the small folk need you or whatever
A year or so ago I went to wood carving club with a bruised eye from my dog slamming his nose into my eyesocket and like every old lady there pulled me aside at some point to ask if my partner hit me here are some of the solutions they had in case he did.
-Replacing his vitimens with poision
- getting her brother to invite him out onto his boat and then killing him and dumping him in the ocean and saying he got drunk and fell off.
- get tboned with him in the passenger seat and then once he was in the hospital theres all kinds of easy ways to kill him like not washing my hands after a poop and then touching his wound casually.
-replacing his drink of choice with moonshine!?
- take him on a hike thats locally notorious for a rapid otter attacking hikers and once he had rabies I could just kill him any ol way and say self defense.
-One lady just cheerfully informed me she had a gun and only a few years left anyway
So at a party it is socially acceptable to just silently join a circle of people talking and contribute to the conversation when you feel like it as if you already know everyone in the circle, btw.
If you want to know peopleâs names at some point saying âSorry, did I catch your name?â or âSorry, what was your name again?â like youâve briefly been introduced before is a good move.
I have social anxiety and discovered this by trial and error despite my fears. I took on this burden for all of you so you donât have to. Trust me. Just stand in the gap in the circle. Itâs waiting for you. Itâs an event where people are expecting to meet other people. Itâs not creepy or weird. Theyâre there to talk to strangers and friends alike. Just step into the circle.
The stateâs outbreak means adapting to Americaâs new reality, in which vaccine-preventable diseases become common again.
Ben Dowse hadnât expected to treat measles when he became a doctor, but there he was, examining a newborn exposed to the virus in the womb. The infected mother had given birth just hours earlier. The hospital had alerted Dowse to the case before delivery, and heâd braced himself for the worst.
Dowse wore a full-body protective suit with a plastic face mask. As a pediatrician in southern Utah, he couldnât risk getting even a mild infection, because many of his patients are babies too young for measles vaccines or children whose parents choose not to protect them with immunizations. âI went in looking like a scientist in E.T.,â he said.
Measles can cause brain damage, deafness, or death in newborns. If the baby entered the world with a measles rash and fever, Dowse was prepared to give the infant a spinal tap to assess the risk of neurological damage.
Luckily, flushed and crying, the baby looked healthy. To keep it that way, Dowse wanted to inject the baby with concentrated antibodies against the measles virus. To his surprise, the parents objected, promising to give their child âall kinds of vitamin A,â Dowse said. He begged them not to, saying, âYou canât see it on the surface, but the babyâs body is fighting the measles.â They were afraid of vaccines, so Dowse explained that antibodies were different and that they would stop measles from replicating in the infant.
âThat shot is going to basically give the baby ammo to fight,â Dowse said.
The parents relented. A couple of days later, they left the hospital with a child who had narrowly skirted an infection that killed many thousands of babies a century ago. Nonetheless, Dowse said he doubted they would be returning for childhood vaccinations to protect their baby against a bevy of illnesses. Like more than a dozen Utah doctors and health officials who spoke with KFF Health News, Dowse has adjusted his expectations.
He is part of a reluctant cohort of medical professionals now on the front line of Americaâs regressive next chapter in health history, one in which dangerous and preventable diseases return.
âI wish that people could see what I see,â said Nathan Money, a hospital pediatrician in Utah whose eyes welled up with tears as he described children he has treated for measles struggling to breathe. âThis train is going in the wrong direction, and it can feel like a helpless situation, because weâre just not seeing the public messaging and leadership thatâs needed to turn this around.â
Since measles was deemed eliminated in the US a quarter century ago, public health workers have extinguished sporadic outbreaks in close-knit, under-vaccinated communities with targeted methods: Isolate people with measles and quarantine their contacts to contain the virus. But as vaccination rates drop nationwide, the virus is moving beyond insulated communities, overwhelming public health departments constrained by shoestring budgets. Larger outbreaks, the kind not seen for a generation, have forced health officials into a new paradigm: They have stopped racing to âcontainâ infections and shifted gears into what they call âmitigation.â
Utah made that transition early this year, once the outbreak hit âa point where you no longer have control over it,â said state epidemiologist Leisha Nolen. By March, measles had been detected in every health jurisdiction in the state and in northern Arizona. More than 950 people have tested positive in the two states since the outbreak began in August, but many people with measles havenât been tested. A genetic analysis of measles viruses suggested that the true number of cases last year could have been 6.5 times what was known.
Last year under President Donald Trump, US measles cases exceeded 2,000 for the first time since 1992. Six months into 2026, the US has already surpassed that threshold. Prolonged outbreaks exact a toll on children, who have spent days in hospitals for severe infections and missed weeks of school for mild ones. Adults with measles miss work. Parents delay day care to keep their babies safe. Doctors in Utah have enacted labor-intensive protocols to keep measles from spreading in clinics. Newborns and people with weakened immune systems who have been exposed to the virus receive infusions of concentrated antibodies costing $500 to $1,000. Medical visits for measles can cost more than $33,000 per patient. Health departments spend millions trying to curb infections.
âThis is like a snowball that gathers speed as it rolls downhill,â said Emilie Morris, a hospital pediatrician in Salt Lake County and Utah County. A full-throttle campaign to educate communities on the safety of vaccines and the diseases they prevent could turn the situation around, doctors and health officials said. It would require an effort similar to what the anti-vaccine movement has long done in videos, blogs, and podcasts. For example, the anti-vaccine organization that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. founded before taking the helm at the Department of Health and Human Services, Childrenâs Health Defense, visits vaccine-hesitant communities, produces movies, and has bought advertisements on Facebook that downplay the threat of viruses while wildly exaggerating the risk of vaccine side effects. Kennedyâs words and actions as health secretary are adding to parentsâ doubt.
After the development of vaccines and antibiotics in the mid-1900s, virologist and Nobel laureate Frank Macfarlane Burnet wrote, âOne can think of the middle of the twentieth century as the end of one of the most important social revolutions in history, the virtual elimination of the infectious diseases as a significant factor in social life.â
He couldnât have imagined what was coming.
âYear of Sicknessâ
In communities nestled among the red sandstone cliffs and riparian forests of southern Utah, measles took hold last summer. At the main school in Hildale, a town along the Arizona border, just 30 percent of kindergartners are considered adequately immunized by Utahâs health department, meaning theyâve gotten recommended vaccines against measles, tetanus, polio, and more. Exemptions from childhood vaccine requirements are easily acquired in the state; parents need only claim personal, religious, or medical reasons.
Many people in Hildale and the surrounding towns are connected to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a sect that has been leery of the government since a police raid in 1953 separated polygamous parents from their children. Shirlee Draper, a southern Utah resident who grew up in the faith, said they became ever more isolated in the early 2000s under the leadership of Warren Jeffs. Before he was sentenced to life in prison for sexual assault against minors, Jeffs instructed his followers to withdraw from public schools and mainstream medicine.
âGrowing up, we all got our vaccines,â said Draper, who left the group during Jeffsâ reign. âIt wasnât until Warren Jeffs came along that there started to be more and more resistance.â
After Jeffs went to prison, many people left the faith but remained concerned about vaccines because of online misinformation, such as claims that the shots are toxic. Today a small shop in Hildale sells mouth sprays and oral drops professing to detoxify vaccines. Water, glycerin, and âwhole grain alcoholâ are listed as ingredients in one called Vxx-Dtx.
A mother who KFF Health News agreed not to name, because she fears stigmatization, said she considered getting her kids vaccinated when schools in southwest Utah started seeing measles cases last summer. She had split from the fundamentalist group but still worried about vaccines giving her children autism or other complications. Large studies published in top-tier scientific journals have refuted a link between vaccines and autism, but the anti-vaccine movement has kept the notion alive.
Then the womanâs son told her that his classmate had a rash and spit on him, she said. A few days later, he fell ill with a fever, followed by vomiting, diarrhea, and a head-to-toe rash.
âHe felt downright sick for 10 to 14 days,â the woman said. âIt was hard to see the end of the tunnel.â
Then her daughters came down with measles. She had a fleeting case, too, even though she had been vaccinated as a child. Breakthrough infections tend to be mild and are relatively rare. Only 4 percent of more than 4,300-plus US cases reported this year and last have been people whoâve had two doses of the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine.
By the time the family recovered, the son had missed nearly three weeks of school, the daughters a month, and the mother had postponed an important family gathering because she didnât want to spread infections. âI just got my youngestâs missed-school report and itâs super high,â she said. âThis is the year of sickness.â
The woman said she regretted not getting her kids vaccinated when the outbreak started. She said she knows about 30 people who have fallen sick with the measles. Except for a few who needed medical care, they havenât been tested. âI bet thereâs been thousands of cases,â she said.
Measles doesnât have a cure. She and others have tried to ease symptoms with cod liver oil, vitamin C, zinc, and âessential oils,â plant extracts long used in folk medicine that have become a lucrative industry in Utah. People in southwest Utah are trying a lot of things: One resident sells homemade lotion on Facebook, writing, âBreastmilk & Honey has been a life saver for the measles rash.â
Beyond Containment
The outbreak may have started among a fundamentalist community, but it has spread far beyond because Utahâs vaccination rates have dropped steadily since the Covid pandemic. Fewer than 80 percent of kindergartners were adequately immunized in the 2024â25 school year in southwestern Utah, with only 87 percent adequately immunized in the state as a wholeâfar below the 95 percent threshold required for herd immunity.
Several Utahns told KFF Health News that âalternative healthâ or âwellnessâ drives the trend, rather than religion. The state has a thriving supplement industry, worth $6.1 billion in 2023, aided by deregulatory policies supported by the late Utah senator Orrin Hatch, and a high concentration of people who earn income from multilevel marketing. These networks of people sell supplements, essential oils, peptides, and other alternative therapies on social media, YouTube, and podcasts, according to scholarly articles and industry analyses.
Alternative health isnât necessarily anti-vaccine, but many people who sell unconventional remedies online and in podcasts deride vaccines and mainstream medicine.
âPeople are suspicious, and itâs well founded,â Draper said. She described dismissive doctors, exorbitant medical bills, hospital systems that put profits over care, and pharmaceutical companies that drove opioid addiction. Communities already wary of government authorities are poised to interpret failings in American health care as signs that medical authorities arenât to be trusted, either, she said.
âAcross America, we have entire populations who find safety in clinging to whatever confirms their deeply held beliefs,â she said.
A mistrustful disposition gave way to Covid conspiracy theories in 2020 and 2021. In southwest Utah, for example, a pickup truck tricked out with digital billboards showed up to Covid vaccination sites to advertise Plandemic, a 26-minute viral video rife with conspiratorial claims, including that masks âactivateâ the coronavirus and that global elites planned Covid-19 to control the population. Misinformation added fuel to anger about public health rules, and there was political backlash under the umbrella of a largely Republican âmedical freedomâ movement. Utah enacted laws reining in public health, including one that eases exemptions to childhood vaccinations and another that prohibits most employers from requiring vaccines.
In the wake of the Covid backlash, health officials tread lightly. Rather than enforce containment measures, âwe give our advice and focus on personal responsibility,â said David Heaton, public information officer at the Southwest Utah Public Health Department.
One of the most contagious diseases in the world, measles spreads with astonishing speed among the unvaccinated. One meticulous study of a New York school outbreak in 1974 found that a second-grader with measles infected 28 other students in 14 classrooms because measles can spread through ventilation systems.
As cases doubled, then quadrupled in southern Utah, the regional health department couldnât keep up with calling the contacts of everyone infected. It shifted its efforts to announcements guiding the public at large. For example, it asks people to call before showing up to clinics with measles symptoms. Still, patients in plenty of hospitals have been exposed. For example, when parents brought a sick, unvaccinated child to a large pediatric hospital in Utah in September, they shared the space with 11 infants too young to be vaccinated. Doctors rushed to give the babies infusions of antibodies and they remained healthy, according to a recent report.
On the radio and in posts on social media, Heaton warns that measles is spreading and that vaccines are the best defense. âIf youâre not immunized and youâre anywhere in public,â Heaton said, âyouâre fair game for this virus.â
The department doesnât have the capacity to talk with people directly in the five counties it serves. For a few years, it leaned on community health workers who went to churches, town halls, and other gathering places, listening to peopleâs concerns and telling them what the science said about Covid, vaccines, and other matters of public health. But these workers were laid off early last year, after the Trump administration clawed back more than $12 billion in federal public health grants to states.
âWe were starting to get a little bit of traction,â Heaton said of the community workers. âAnd then we lost all of our team.â
The department offers measles vaccines to children for free, but uptake is slow. Nursing director Mindy Bundy said that when she started the job 20 years ago, demand was so high that she would give parents tickets while they waited, as if they were crowding around a deli counter.
âNow even in an outbreak,â she said, âwe arenât seeing a huge increase of people wanting vaccination.â
As officials tried to do the best they could, the outbreak spread north, hopping from one under-vaccinated community to the next. When health officials in Utah County spoke with people who had tested positive, they often had no connection to other known cases. âPretty quickly, we started to lose the links,â said Michael Leman, the county health departmentâs nursing director. Contact tracing, the cornerstone of containment, was failing.
Every week, the state health department posted a growing list of locations on its websiteâa Trader Joeâs, a Mormon temple, an aquarium, preschoolsâthat people had visited while contagious. But many people who tested positive hadnât been to those places, Leman said. âThey could have gotten it at Walmart. They could have gotten it walking through a mall,â he said. âI mean, just anywhere in the public they could have been exposed.â
In February, high school students throughout Utah tested positive after a state wrestling tournament at Utah Valley University in Orem. A dashboard monitoring measles viruses in wastewater lit up with notifications around the state. âWrestling really feels like our turning point,â said Nicholas Rupp, communications director at the Salt Lake County Health Department.
Salt Lake Countyâs shift from containment to mitigation meant prioritizing high-risk situations and relaxing control everywhere else. When a student has a confirmed case, for example, health officials meet with the school nurse to figure out which kids are most vulnerable. Unvaccinated children in the same classroom as someone infected are asked to stay home for 21 days, but those in other classrooms might not be, said Melanie Crossland, an epidemiologist at the Salt Lake health department. Some schools with high vaccination rates have opted to monitor student temperatures daily instead of requesting quarantines. One school created a separate space for the unvaccinated.
Crossland said such bespoke strategies entail a âhugeâ amount of effort but have staved off blowback that deflated her during Covid.
âWe give everything when weâre here,â she said, âbut the days of killing ourselves, when legislatively no one is going to give us any help, are done.â
Day Care Dilemma
The outbreak has lasted so long that some children who have recovered from measles have since been hospitalized for what should be mild illnesses from common bugs, said Kerri Smith, a hospital pediatrician in southwest Utah. Measles can erase the immune systemâs memory, impairing a bodyâs ability to fight other viruses. âItâs making children very susceptible to getting sick again,â Smith said.
Her eyes were bloodshot, and she looked drained from a week of long shifts. Since the outbreak began, she has treated more than a dozen babies and children severely sick from measles.
âTheyâre usually admitted to the hospital with measles pneumonia, so theyâre struggling to breathe, pulling for air below their ribs,â she said. âHigh fevers, 104 to 105, absolutely miserable, extremely fatigued, really dehydrated, with sunken eyes.â Most children fully recover from measles, but a fraction develop permanent hearing loss, a small percentage die, and in rare cases, measles kills a person years after the infection.
No one has died so far in Utahâs outbreak. And barring that tragic outcome, Smith and other doctors said, some parents fail to grasp the gravity of measles, even as their own children have tubes inserted into their small nostrils to deliver oxygen. Despite repeated warnings, doctors said, some unvaccinated family members of patientsâwho could be contagiousâwalk around the hospital while visiting their loved one. This means the waiting room, the elevator, the cafeteria, and other places need to be shut down for cleaning and vulnerable people alerted.
âPeople donât realize how easily this spreads,â Smith said.
Morris, the pediatrician working in two counties, recalled a conversation with a nonchalant father who didnât seem to understand the need for quarantine. âI know this is an inconvenience to you,â she said. âItâs also a huge inconvenience to the parent who has an infant who could be severely impacted by this disease.â
On top of feeling depleted, doctors with young children said they are anxious. Emily Chin, a physician in Salt Lake County, worries sheâll bring measles home to her newborn. One evening, she sat in her garage after caring for a child with a rash. The patientâs measles test was still being processed, so Chin isolated herself in a room for the night, wearing an N95 mask instead of holding her infant.
Like many mothers in Utah, Chin plans to give her baby an early dose of the measles vaccine at 6 months old because of the outbreak, in addition to two doses at ages 1 and 4. Several mothers said they avoid travel and public places because they fear their babies could be infected. Some are delaying day care. Others, like Kandace Hyland, a marketing director in Salt Lake County, donât have that option.
Hyland was shocked when her day care told her that it didnât track the vaccine status of staff, even amid the outbreak. In March, she posted an online petition calling for the state to require day care staff to be vaccinated against the measles when the virus is spreading. Even if day care staff file for vaccine exemptions, she said, parents could at least find out what portion of their babiesâ caretakers pose a life-threatening risk.
Hyland sent her idea to the state health department. Nolen, the state epidemiologist, said she agreed with the concern and was âtalking with the division of licensing about the issue,â in an email shared with KFF Health News. Hyland also wrote the Division of Licensing and Background Checks. In an email, its director, Shannon Thoman-Black, replied that the division does ânot have the legislative authority to implement a mandate.â
âThey always talk about parentsâ choice,â Hyland said. âBut I donât feel like I have a really good parentsâ choiceâ right now.â
Measlesâ Comeback
The US will almost certainly lose its measles-elimination status this year or next, but it could be regained if political leadership backed nationwide campaigns to boost confidence in vaccines, said Demetre Daskalakis, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Preventionâs national immunization center and now the chief medical officer at the Callen-Lorde community health center in New York.
âUnder Secretary Kennedyâs leadership, thatâs unlikely to happen,â he said. âWeâre going back to a pre-vaccine era.â
HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard defended the secretary and his agency in an email, writing that the CDC has âsurged resourcesâ to contain measles outbreaks. âThe CDC, HHS principles, and the secretary have been vocal that the MMR vaccine is the best way to protect yourself against measles,â she said.
Kennedyâs words and actions suggest otherwise. Heâs said that the measles vaccine leads to âdeaths every year,â which is not true. He continues to tout a potential link between autism and vaccines, no matter how many studies conclude there is none. And he oversaw abrupt changes to the recommended childhood vaccine schedule, a move medical societies called dangerous and not backed by science. A federal judge blocked those changes in March, but Trump recently issued an executive order to reexamine the schedule.
âItâs been confusing for the public,â said Dorothy Adams, executive director of the Salt Lake County Health Department.
In May, Kennedy met with Republican Utah governor Spencer Cox, who has said little about the stateâs ongoing outbreak. Kennedy praised Utahâs action on Make America Healthy Again priorities, such as banning fluoride in public drinking water and easing restrictions on raw milk sales, according to Salt Lake Cityâs Deseret News. Cox declined to comment for this article.
Meanwhile, the chronically depleted US public health system has been further weakened by the Trump administrationâs cuts and delays to public health grants.
âIf youâre in the thick of it, and you donât know if you will be reimbursed, you adjust your response,â said Angela Dunn, a doctor and former Utah state epidemiologist. âThis outbreak is a perfect storm of disinformation, trauma from the Covid pandemic, and the drop in funding.â
Measles isnât the only preventable malady making a comeback. As children played nearby in a sun-speckled park in Salt Lake City, Morris talked about a baby in the intensive care unit who was bleeding uncontrollably after a fall. The babyâs parents had refused an injection of vitamin K that helps blood clot in newborns. As they fretted over their infant, Morris said, she felt awful for them and regretted not being able to overcome mistrust in basic, lifesaving interventions. She had the same swirl of emotions when an unvaccinated toddler in her care recently died of whooping cough.
âI was one of the only people in the room with the nurse when the child coded,â she said with tears in her eyes. âYou think, âI wish this child was vaccinated,â but itâs hard, because I also see how much grief these parents are holding.â
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFFâthe independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
I can listen to somebody talk about their interests like this forever. Please please tell me what realistic plants you found in your game. please tell me about all the propane tanks you saw in your game.
You know what I want more of? Non-sexual intimacy. In close moments between friends. The âI canât do this aloneâ. The âI need helpâ. The wounds that need bandaged. The âI canât change my clothes on my ownâ. The need for help with simple tasks for different reasons. Maybe a recent injury or disability means they donât know how to shower yet and they need help.
I want that. Write me that. You say that they are as close as family so show me they are as close as family.