I'm literally getting teary eyed, y'all

Stolen from Twitter​

In a virtual event last week that was billed as a “Latino Town Hall,” presidential candidate and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. unveiled his plan to overhaul addiction treatment programs. Speaking during a live recording of the Latino Capitalist podcast, Kennedy described opioid, antidepressant, and ADHD “addicts” receiving treatment on tech-free “wellness farms,” where they would spend as much as three or four years growing organic produce.

How to pay for these farms? Kennedy had an answer. With money generated through a sales tax on cannabis products, Kennedy said, “I’m going to dedicate that revenue to creating wellness farms—drug rehabilitation farms, in rural areas all over this country,” he said. “I’m going to make it so people can go, if you’re convicted of a drug offense, or if you have a drug problem, you can go to one of these places for free.”

On the farms, he said, residents would grow their own organic food—which would help them recover from addiction, “because a lot of the behavioral issues are food related. A lot of the illnesses are food related.” The idea that addiction is connected to consuming non-organic food is not backed by robust science—but it’s in line with many other unfounded claims that Kennedy has made in the past about pesticides and non-organic food causing chronic disease, behavioral problems, and autism.

Cell phones and other screens, he said, would be prohibited. “We’re going to re-parent people and restore connection to community,” he promised. “We have a whole generation of kids who are dispossessed, they’re alienated, their marginalized, their suicide rates are exploding; the second largest killer for young people is drug addiction.” Kennedy has suggested in the past that 5G cell phone technology could cause health problems.

The range of people receiving such treatment could potentially include wide swaths of the population, since the wellness farms wouldn’t just be for people addicted to illegal drugs, but also for people who are taking antidepressants and ADHD medications. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 11 percent of Americans ages 12 and older take antidepressants, and about 4 percent of Americans between the ages of five and 64 take medication for ADHD.

I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go to get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also illegal drugs, other psychiatric drugs, if they want to, to get off of SSRIs, to get off of benzos, to get off of Adderall, and to spend time as much time as they need—three or four years if they need it—to learn to get reparented, to reconnect with communities.

Last year, Kennedy posited during a Twitter spaces event with Elon Musk that antidepressants could be to blame for school shootings.

The Kennedy campaign didn’t respond to Mother Jones’ request for comment on the remarks that Kennedy made during this event.

Stolen from Twitter

A new drug described as “the closest we have ever been to an HIV vaccine” could cost $40 (£31) a year for every patient, a thousand times less than its current price, new research suggests.

Lenacapavir , sold as Sunlenca by US pharmaceutical giant Gilead, currently costs $42,250 for the first year. The company is being urged to make it available at a thousand times less than that price worldwide.

UNAids said it could “herald a breakthrough for HIV prevention” if the drug was available “rapidly and affordably”.

Given by injection every six months, lenacapavir can prevent infection and suppress HIV in people who are already infected.

In a trial, the drug offered 100% protection to more than 5,000 women in South Africa and Uganda, according to results announced by Gilead last month.

Lenacapavir is currently licensed for treatment, not prevention.

In a study presented at the 25th international Aids conference in Munich on Tuesday, experts calculated that the minimum price for mass production of a generic version, based on the costs of lenacapavir’s ingredients and manufacturing, and allowing for 30% profit, was $40 a year , assuming 10 million people used it annually. In the long-term, 60 million people would probably need to take the drug preventatively to lower HIV levels significantly, they said.

Dr Andrew Hill, of Liverpool University, who led the research, said: “You’ve got an injection somebody could have every six months and not get HIV. That’s as close as we’ve ever been to an HIV vaccine.”

Most HIV prevention presently relies on daily pills and barrier measures, such as condoms.

Campaigners want Gilead to allow generic licensing through the UN-backed Medicines Patent Pool in all low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), which account for 95% of HIV infections. Similar mechanisms have been in place in the HIV treatment market for decades, where wealthy countries pay higher prices than poorer ones.

If that did not happen, Hill said, countries should consider issuing compulsory licences allowing generic manufacture in the face of a public health emergency.

Gilead said it was “too early” to price lenacapavir for prevention, as it was awaiting clinical trial data and potential regulatory filings, but promised “a strategy to enable broad, sustainable access globally”.

This would include both “Gilead supply in the countries where the need is greatest until voluntary licensing partners are able to supply high-quality, low-cost versions of lenacapavir” and a voluntary licensing programme for “high-incidence, resource-limited countries”. Gilead said choosing those countries was ongoing.

But campaigners said it was vital that all LMICs, including “upper middle-income” nations such as Brazil, had access to low-cost generic forms of the drug.

Similar selections in the past had excluded countries where the HIV epidemic was growing fastest, they said.

Trials in LMICs made the case for universal access even stronger, Hill said, pointing to the Helsinki Declaration on medical ethics, which said that trials should only be performed in populations who stood to benefit from the results.

Joyce Ouma, senior programmes officer at Y+ Global, a network of young people living with HIV, said a twice-yearly injectable would be “transformative for young people like me living with or at risk of HIV”.

Ouma said: “It’s not an exaggeration to say that meeting the 2030 goal of ending new HIV transmissions hinges on Gilead ensuring people in the global south have fair access to lenacapavir.”

Winnie Byanyima, executive director of UNAids, said treatment could be “life-saving” by providing a more discreet option than daily tablets for people who faced stigma because of their HIV status or sexuality.

100% stolen from this Twitter post

Like in the 90s, there were zero veg restaurants (in my town, anyways). The best you could do was Indian, and damn I ate a lot of Indian. I was lucky if a store had one kind of tofu. Soymilk wasn't really sold in the store. Fake meats and specialty veg foods didn't exist. No vegan ice creams and desserts and shit. Also no Uber Eats.

I listen to people complaining today and I really have no patience for it. I went vegetarian (not vegan*) at 19. I bought and cooked my own meals. I made a fuck ton of rice and beans. And I had to do this in a suburban hell with no car. Adults in a city whinge that it's hard and I'm like

Granted, people living in rural Kansas or whatever food desert might have it harder. For the rest, fucking just do it.

*I've been vegan for ten years now

I should have known better, as the whole cowboy genre is terrible as fuck. Westerns (as boomer Americans call the genre) have the slowest dialogue, the corniest patriarchal story-line, and are obviously filled with a heap ton of other problematic bits. Of course, I had to try as the game got great reviews. I thought I'd try it with the Steam summer sale.

Fuckkkkkkkk the long boring ass cut scenes. OMG pls talk faster and have dialogue that's interesting. The beginning of the game is just 30 minutes of video and riding your horse so slowly through the snow. I thought that my TikTok brain couldn't stand some old slow game from a bygone era, but I'm checking this shit and it was released in 2018!

If I was some prat who loved the mythology of the "settling of the west", a game with a white dude on a horse on a mountain would get me hard. Why can't more games be like Atomic Heart? I wanna defend the land of Stalin and have cut scenes with ~~good dialogue~~ a talking glove that debates theory and a sexy refrigerator that probably wants to murder me.

But the pro-Palestine activists are anti-semites. I'm waiting for the ADL to condemn this.

A Conservative student association has been condemned after attenders at one of its events were filmed singing a Nazi marching song.

Footage showed a group of people at a black-tie dinner hosted by the University of Warwick Conservative Association dancing to Erika by German composer Herms Niel.

The song was frequently played at military events in Nazi Germany and has also been used by modern white supremacist movements. Its lyrics are not explicitly political, but Niel was a member of the Nazi party and personally conducted bands at Nazi rallies.

The Sunday Times, which published the clip, reported that it was shot at the association’s annual chairman’s dinner at a hotel in Leamington Spa. Just before the clip ends, someone out of shot can be heard saying: “Don’t film.”

The Union of Jewish Students described the clip as “utterly abhorrent” and said it showed “blatant and unchallenged support for nazism”, adding: “Glorification of the Nazis has no place in our society, especially on campus. It is in no way acceptable and must be widely condemned.

“We expect swift and decisive action from the University of Warwick and the Conservative party. Actions must have consequences.”

The association told the MailOnline that it “wholeheartedly condemns the behaviour exhibited during this video and apologises for any offence that has been caused”.

It said Erika was played for a “brief period” after a request from one member to the DJ and was “not included in the preplanned music selection handed to the DJ”. The clip was taken at a dinner of the University of Warwick Conservatives Association.

sorry I keep posting today