I watched a documentary about Morgellons, and the patients would often seem quite reasonable at first, but the more they spoke, and the more they described their symptoms, the crazier they sounded.
One patient, whose brother, ironically, was a physician (and one skeptical of Morgellons as anything other than delusional parasitosis), seemed earnest, if intense, in describing how Morgellons had destroyed his quality of life... but then he started describing how he felt like he was able to inadvertently affect electronic devices, especially RF-based ones, because the Morgellons "fibers" in his extremities caused some kind of interference. At this point, he sounded squarely cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.
However, one could very well imagine an infectious disease, with or without a dermatological component, causing delusional parasitosis. Maybe they have some virus or something that makes them think they have these "fibers?" Or a parasite? Toxoplasma gondii is known to affect inhibition. UTIs in the elderly are notorious for making them crazy.
Besides that fact that in this particular case there probably really is 'something' (it would be rare for the brain to spontaneously exhibit CJD symptoms, though it does happen this would most likely not lead to a cluster of cases), you don't need to propose an infectious disease for people that say they have symptoms where there are none, when there is ample proof of people being able to influence each other into believing all kinds of crap to the point that it becomes part of their identity.
I once had a woman and her husband visiting to inquire about buying a house I owned in Northern Groningen, pretty much as far away from anything as you could possibly get in this crowded country. They arrived in a taxi that was blanked for the day (it turned out the man was a cab driver) and after looking the place over and liking it visibly the woman said 'oh, we really like it, but there is one more thing, I am allergic to electromagnetic radiation so let me verify that' (eye roll by the man at this point). She went to the car and came back with a box with a dial on it that she had bought online (a pretty basic field strength meter, set to the most sensitive part of the range) and started walking around muttering to herself and waving the box around like a modern day dowser.
After a while of this she came to me and said she was really sorry but she had to drop her interest because the house was absolutely infested with EM fields. In Amsterdam, where they lived, they had turned their whole apartment into a cage of Faraday with copper mesh nailed against every surface (it turned out they lived right opposite the KPN microwave tower next to the RAI so maybe she even had a point, that thing featured multiple RF links beaming 100's of Watts on tight beam links between other such towers, at some point in the past these carried our long distance phone calls before fiber came along).
I asked if I could see her box for a second and pointed it at the sun: the needle pegged instantly and she was most surprised, so I explained that what she is measuring is real, but so faint that the chances of any kind of interaction with her body are most likely delusional.
Here the conversation abruptly ended...
As for TFA: prions, the agents responsible for CJD are remarkably resilient and annoying and can make it through the foodchain across the digestive barrier and into the brain and even a single one of them can cause CJD.
Perhaps a bit tangential to the main topic, but it is of course true that UTIs can adversely affect cognition in the elderly, even precipitate delirium, etc., depending on type and severity of infection. Naturally that also occurs with other sources of infection, and factors including intoxication due to drugs (prescribed or otherwise) and a host of others. Vulnerability to such decompensation is greater among those already functioning marginally. As such accurate diagnosis can be hard to establish particularly when multiple factors are implicated, hardly a rare circumstance. (At least in my physician-practice that's frequently been the case.)
I appreciate your comment pointing to the importance of carefully evaluating individuals manifesting new onset delusional ideation or other "mental" disturbance. It might be associated with an obscure condition, but likely enough it's the result of common maladies. The worst error is thinking one knows what's going on before (or not at all) thoroughly investigating the possibilities.
Do you really think there being a mass hysteria component to this, especially in the age of TikTok, doesn't warrant serious consideration? Your alarm bells didn't go off when you saw the photos and read the profiles of some of these people, especially the 18yo who supposedly needs a wheelchair and a cane?
> Cormier has featured heavily in the media coverage of the cluster, becoming a kind of poster child for the mystery disease. She was first referred to Marrero at just 18. A high school student, dancer and competitive figure skater, she had begun to experience fatigue-like symptoms and muscle soreness and then passed out at school.
> Cormier was already taking anti-anxiety medication, and the hospital emergency room doctor told her the incident was anxiety-induced.
The other young person woman contemplating MAiD is especially tragic. Hopefully the doctors do not enable her.
> However, one could very well imagine an infectious disease, with or without a dermatological component, causing delusional parasitosis.
Except what's more likely is that it's just psychological - which doesn't mean it doesn't have physiological treatments, it's just going to be for the psyche issue though.
Put it another way: it's well recognized eating disorders exist. But they're psychological disorders: they respond to psychological interventions and treatments, and are curable, but can also "spread" in viral like ways - i.e. an eating disorder can be induced by environmental (peer group) factors.
We don't generally posit that a virus spreads eating disorders, nor has any evidence of one been identified. And so in the same way, there's no reason to think Morgellons should have any underlying pathological cause that's any different, since none has been identified but we are aware of a number of psychological self-harm disorders (which can be amplified or spread sociologically but also just be unusual presentations of other conditions).
Worth noting that in a preindustrial society, plenty of mental illness is caused by infectious agents- at minimum rabies, hookworm, syphilis- so it’s not like science doesn’t believe mental illness can be caused by an infectious agent, or has any bias against that hypothesis. Its one of the first things checked for.
> TikTok deemed I should not have access to my account ever again, and X (formerly Twitter) is delaying a response to my appeal to the suspension, but I have not much hope; I reckon it's gone for good. I may have lost all the personal contacts and content from there, but on the bright side, that has taught and made me see some other things, besides the importance of being a little smarter to not blindly install extensions like my life depended on it.
Well, losing access to both TikTok and X could be considered a bright side as well. But more seriously, isn't it tragic that you can't just blindly assume any piece of OSS isn't malware, anymore?
Were you active on SF or Savannah 20+ years ago? Everyone knew everyone else, and it was a much higher-trust society (think Minneapolis before Somalis).
> The whitehats/grayhats have always been super paranoid.
Yeah, they were always "super paranoid," but it was about something that could, and admittedly eventually did happen--but not for many years later. I remember in the Perl community, there was a big scandal where some module was "phoning home" on install (for the sake of telemetry), which the author fixed in response to the outcry. I remember a hapless Debian contributor who, in an attempt to silence Valgrind warnings, inadvertently reduced the entropy used for keygen (after some miscommunication with OpenSSL upstream), and was unfairly accused by some of intentionally backrdooring it. That was the extent of OSS malware back then.
Then along comes Github, and lets anyone upload anything, doesn't do even the minimal vetting of forcing you to explain what your project is and why it should be on GH, doesn't make you explicitly select an OSI-approved license, lets your freely fork other people's projects and even duplicate the project's name (making it difficult to identify canonical repos). It fosters a culture of just forking whatever you want, pulling in whatever you want, uploading any codeslop, ecourages MIT over copyleft, and has gamified crap like star rankings and activity graphs.
Thiel has never espoused anything remotely close to this, and has even shown, in his lectures, a willingness to engage with Marxist thought, even if he disagrees with it, and to try to separate and highlight the intellectual wheat from the chaff.
However, the "Paradox of Tolerance" left doesn't really have much of a leg to stand on here, when they've been asserting their right to assault or even kill anyone they deem a Nazi, or even just a "fascist" (a horribly overloaded term), since even before the first Trump administration. The comments extremistwashing Charlie Kirk and implicitly or even explicitly ("[ Removed by Redit ]") justifying his execution did well enough to alienate moderate rightwingers to the degree that few, if any, will voice their opposition to the normalization of this kind of rhetoric targeting communists.
The irony of this talk is that the prospect of the US having its own de facto "Great Firewall," albeit one imposed from without rather than from within, doesn't sound that bad to any American old enough to remember what the Internet was like before its successive waves of global Septemberings: https://old.reddit.com/r/Infographics/comments/1l5bhfo/total...
The Twitter/X location experiment/debacle laid this bare, showing how much low-effort, divisive, often racially or religiously antagonistic content directed at Americans was actually foreign (e.g., the Indians LARPing as white nationalists with classical statue avatars).
I don't support it, but seeing the tankies get apoplectic over it is pretty sweet. Also the power flex and the indirect humiliation and undermining of both China AND Russia simultaneously is also pretty sweet.
It's illegal to carry, even if properly licensed, a firearm on Capitol grounds. So searching for "Unlawful Possession of a Firearm on Capitol Grounds or Buildings" yields an approximate total number of rioters carrying firearms (as opposed to just "deadly weapons," which also includes things like batons, baseball bats, and various household objects). That total number is 6.
What you write is true, but leaves out the Oathkeepers' setting up a literal armory just outside of DC. That's the reason for Stewart Rhodes' seditious conspiracy trial and conviction.
I'm a little mystified as to why the weapons from that armory never got used. Trump's response to the insurrection he provoked is weird, but so is the insurrectionists behavior.
The appetite HN has for this kind of naked self-promotion is really something. Get posted (even if by someone else) a few too many times to /g/ and you'll be regularly rebuked with "buy an ad" from then on, but HN just looks the other way, and the "haters" calling it out get flagged, at least until the pattern becomes conspicuous and obnoxious enough that even the more gullible lot of HNers start to notice.
Honestly, until encrypted client hello has widespread support, why bother?
I mean I did it for fun the first time and now with caddy its not a lot of effort. But for a personal blog, a completely static site, what benefit do you get from the encryption? Anyone monitoring the traffic will see the domain in clear text anyway. And they'd see the destination IP, which I imagine in this case being one server that has exactly one domain pointed at it.
Men in the middle including predatory ISPs can not only spy but also enrich. Injecting JavaScript and embedding ads is the best case scenario. You don't want that.
In addition even without bad actors TLS will prevent random corruption due to flaky infrastructure from breaking the page and even caching those broken assets, preventing a reload from fixing it. TCP/IP alone doesn't sufficiently prevent this.
TCP ensures what gets sent on one side gets received on the other side. TLS just encrypts the data. So even without TLS, random corruptions won't happen unless someone does MITM attack.
No it does not. I've had this happen in legacy systems myself. The checksums of TCP/IP are weak and will let random errors through to L7 if there are enough of them. It's not even CRC and you must bring your own verification if it's critical for your application that the data is correct. TLS does that and more, protecting not only against random corruption but also active attackers. The checks you get for free are to be seen only as an optimization, letting most but not all errors be discarded quick and easy. Just use TLS.
Integrity. TLS does prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. For a personal blog, that may not be important but you _do_ get a benefit, even if the encryption is not necessary.
Yeah, that was my point. This guy is Linus' chief lieutenant and heir apparent, and he doesn't even bother to ensure the integrity of his transmissions is protected through TLS.
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