BC HISTORY
Saved by @Alex1Powell

Look at some historical examples of mass psychogenic illnesses: dancing plagues, laughing plagues, meowing nuns,

 Here's a video on them: https://t.co/YNxCk7ZpEe
They are interesting, but what is more interesting to me is Culture Bound Syndrome. https://t.co/hMKaApUMZn

Basically: mass psychogenic illness, and presentation of various mental illnesses, do not occur in a vacuum. Cultures shape them.
For instance, Koro.

There have been several mass outbreaks of men completely convinced their penises are shrinking, anchoring them with string at night so they don't get sucked back inside.

Almost all in Southeast Asia.

https://t.co/fr9X1E1ayx
Here's a description of one outbreak in Hainan in 1984: https://t.co/GsXCZ70qx1
In Italy, there've been outbreaks of tarantism https://t.co/QGq9VAybjt

In which people compulsively dance until exhaustion, dehydration, and death.
Resignation syndrome among Swedish children, who go into a dissociative catatonic state https://t.co/sABPjuP4zs
Piblokto among Inuit women, deserves a mention.

It is not real. Arctic explorers invented it to justify sexually assaulting women.

Like drapetomania, it was colonizers pathologizing self preservation

https://t.co/cmq6zg9ZJ1
What it amounts to is common sense: you don't live in a vacuum. Paranoid delusions, compulsions, hallucinations, all are shaped by your culture.

You should expect there to be different presentations of various mental illnesses in different places.
Just think about night terrors over time.

150 years ago, if you had night terrors, you hallucinated monsters and fair folk trying to eat you.

After the Wright brothers, you probably hallucinated aliens abducting you.
So: culture influences presentation. It shapes the models you adopt, how you behave. This is common sense.
Which leads, of course, to zombies.

The US has had modern zombies permeate public consciousness for 52 years. Everyone knows what zombies are. They are as ingrained into culture as any folkloric demon or monster anywhere else.
If you wanted to realistically cause at least a limited zombie outbreak, you probably could do it by inducing a mass psychogenic illness in the US.

No rage virus or space radiation or 2-4-5 trioxin needed. Just stress, applied at the right points.
Basically, every recorded instance of a mass psychogenic illness occurred among people experiencing stress of some sort. Check out a list: https://t.co/LkoDVgRO5Z
William Byrd High School in 2007, multiple schools in Afghanistan in 2009, LeRoy High School in 2011, the 2016 evil clowns, etc

Stress, in the right conditions, does interesting things.
You simply need to find a small group of vulnerable, stressed people, and allow them an outlet to relieve that stress.

Schools and convents have historically been perfect breeding grounds for this.
Find that vulnerable, stressed group, your petri dish.

Get them to have zombies on their mind. Have em do zombie-related art, or marathons of zombie movies, or do papers on the ethnology of zombies.

Let that percolate.
And then, spike their stress to 11.

Somehow frustrate the everloving fuck out of them. Constrain their freedom, clamp down with your adult authority, annoy them even more than teenagers usually are annoyed.
At that critical moment of shared stress, in that vulnerable group of people who have zombies on their mind, offer them an outlet.

Have one kid pretend to bite another. Use squibs for realism, call in a favor from Tom Savini or something.
And voila. With any luck, your stressed-out little guinea pigs will relieve that stress in the most natural, intuitive way they can: acting like zombies.
If you think that's far fetched, read up on some of those historical incidents I linked above.

People have, multiple times, danced so violently for so long that they wore away the skin on their feet revealing bone before dying of dehydration.
They danced, or laughed, or meowed, or attacked their neighbors, because that was in their zeitgeist. Their culture informed the way that stress was relieved.

And in American culture, the zombie is standing right there as a perfect outlet.
In recent times, almost all such outbreaks have occurred in schools, or cramped workshops. Look up the June Bug epidemic.
What this means is, odds are you could create a local, contained zombie outbreak.

You could call it Quisling Syndrome, after the similar condition in the book World War Z.
Could you make it spread beyond your petri dish of stressed out people?

Well, look again at the 2016 evil clowns, and how one of the forgotten plotlines in 2020 was that they'd returned.
If those meowing nuns had had social media, I guarantee you every monastery and convent would have ended up with a case of the meows.
I guarantee you that your little, local outbreak would go viral on tiktok and instagram, it'd be everywhere the same way the Great Bathsalts Zombie story was.

Speaking of which: notice how readily and hungrily people ate that up? How excited they were to see it?
And that is how you easily, cheaply, and entirely realistically create a zombie outbreak without ever needing to do illegal biochemical experiments. Any jackass could do it.

If you do it, buy me some rice to thank me: https://t.co/TRTsg6UUwh

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Vormithrax is basically the Lobos of Cataclysm. He plays the game with challenges that'd make it impossible for other people to survive even for a few minutes.

While his challenge runs are stunning, it is annoying that there *is* a meta.

In each, "normally I'd ___ but I can't do it so easily now, so ___"

What usually happens is someone watches a Cataclysm video, gets it, and then dies.

Then dies and dies and dies, having tons of fun in the process.

And then they learn the meta.

Grind slings to level crafting, search bushes to level survival. Make a knife spear. Stop making a knife spear, they nerfed it.

And before you know it, every game starts the same way. Like a video game, not an apocalypse simulator, or a story generator.
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Consider that Late Registration came out in 2005.

A 15 year old would only know Kanye as a maga hat embarrassment.

The Selfish Gene came out in 1976. Anyone under 44 only knows dawkins in his bigot form.

The milkshake duck time horizon

Dawkins, for instance, has now been a bigot for much longer than he was a respected scientist.

Kanye has been an embarrassment for much longer than he was a talented rapper.

It's like how a 120-year old has spent half their life as an elderly person.

At some point, the milkshake duck has been one so long that no one remembers the milkshake anymore.

It's just the racist duck, or the terf duck, or the virulently islamophobic duck. Or all three, and for brevity simply called the asshole duck
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@pookleblinky
That first $1,200 check was obviously based on gross income from US federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr, for 40 hours a week, for a month: $1,160

What is this $600 amount based on?

The first was "fuck it, give em a month of minimum wage income. No, I don't give a fuck if it's $4 higher in their state."

So: $600. 2 40-hour weeks at $7.25 is $580.

Which is close enough that it *could* be what this number was based on

"Here's 2 weeks of minimum wage income for free, ya fucking plebes" does seem fully believable.

But, it doesn't seem as convincing. Deliberate gesture of cruelty, yes. But they'd try to gussy it up somehow.
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Fun fact: the standard advice for if a dog, cat, or human bites your hand, is to feed the bite. Push your hand further into their mouth, forcing the jaw open.

Nurses, EMTs, veterinarians, etc are taught to respond this

The advice for a human biting you is to jam your hand or arm deeper into their mouth, and rub the spot under their nose back and forth.

If you attempt to remove your hand, or forearm, the teeth do what they're supposed to and gouge out a chunk.

This vicious wolf attack illustrates proper technique.


So: every EMT and nurse who gets bitten by a human, is trained to jam their hand or forearm deeper into the mouth, feeding the bite so the jaw widens enough to remove the limb

Also, every redneck learns this along with the advice of "never run from an angry dog"
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@pookleblinky
An interesting thing about carp is that they can go into anoxic hibernation and switch to an anaerobic metabolism based on converting glycogen to ethanol.

The waste ethanol is diffused out the gills

https://t.co/V3D1umHf04

Carp can switch over to an anaerobic metabolism and quietly exhale booze until the situation gets better.

They basically evolved the same metabolic pathway as yeast, independently.

In theory, if you spent a few thousand years breeding carp for it, you could use them to make booze.

They'd be enormous, almost entirely glycogen deposits with a fish added as an afterthought.

The really interesting thing about anaerobic carp, is that they can go 4-5 months without oxygen by relying on liver glycogen.

You, a human, have only about 100 grams of glycogen in your liver, about 400 more grams in your skeletal muscles. Call it 500 grams total.

In humans, glycogen is also burned for energy. This is where the marathon runner's bonk comes from: you only have about 2,000 calories worth, and running a marathon burns those 2,000 calories.
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In 1937, a trucker got frustrated waiting for his cargo to be unloaded. He later sold his company for $1.1 billion.

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In the early 1950s, the shipping industry was a dying business.

New York’s docks were handling half as much domestic cargo in the early 1950s as they had been in the depressed 1930s.

In thirty years, no one had invested significant money in coastal shipping.

Why?

As McLean found out, loading ships was difficult and slow.

A truck or train would deliver items to the port. Each item was unloaded separately, recorded, and carried to storage.

When a ship was ready, each item was taken from storage, counted again, and hauled on-board.


The cost of this labor was significant. As one expert at the time explained:

“A four-thousand-mile voyage for a shipment might consume 50 percent of its costs in covering just the two ten-mile movements through two ports.”


Yet, despite the industry’s issues, it felt little pressure to change.

Foreigners were barred from operating domestically. Cartels ran international routes. And gov. subsidies eased the pain of labor costs.

Reshaping the industry needed an outsider.

Enter Malcolm McLean.
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Ronald Reagan called Medicare & Medicaid dangerous socialism in 1961... he was a right winger of the Barry Goldwater variety, not the warm and fuzzy presidential muppet he has become in his canonization by the 1980s Alex P. Keatons in the commentariat.

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Reagan gutted what was left of the Great Society to shovel tax cuts into the pockets of the super rich. (My mother's federal job was deleted by his first presidential budget, though my absentee father was a big Reagan fan. Needless to say they divorced).

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There was no stigma around 1982 coup; Kenya was already sliding to the abyss. My fourth thread on Railaphobia in Kikuyuland. LONG THREAD, FREE TO DISCARD

As alluded to in a previous thread, Moi was very popular when he inherited the power from Jomo. He played an important historical role in dismantling Kikuyu hegemony that peaked at Kenyatta’s death. The whole nation supported him thinking it was all driven by national interest

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