Carter

[jfish26]

I think it's important to continue to call out bullshit to keep the bullshit from gaining any relevancy.
The election wasn't stolen.
If you're insisting it was and standing on a soapbox saying that only you know the real truth and then get upset when someone calls you out for it, well, that's on you.

I think that acknowledging that 2020 was not "stolen" is table stakes for being taken seriously vis a vis 2024. Same goes for acknowledging human impact on our climate, for example. It's reasonable to have wildly divergent opinions on what to do, but it is not reasonable - and it does not support being taken as a reasonable person - to deny objective reality.

If I get an MRI that shows a mass in my abdomen, and my bloodwork indicates cancer, and in my first meeting with an oncologist, he diagnoses me with cancer (reasonable) and suggests we start with leeches (cray cray), I'm finding another goddamn oncologist. Because I cannot trust ANYTHING this guy does, even if he's right about some things.

[KUTradition]

and the excuses for not providing whatever evidence supposedly exists?

it’s all so silly

[jfish26]

and the excuses for not providing whatever evidence supposedly exists?

it’s all so silly

It's "my Canadian girlfriend from summer camp is totally real, but no you can't talk to her, you'd accuse me of hiring someone from OnlyFans anyway," in a bad suit.

[KUTradition]

and the excuses for not providing whatever evidence supposedly exists?

it’s all so silly

It's "my Canadian girlfriend from summer camp is totally real, but no you can't talk to her, you'd accuse me of hiring someone from OnlyFans anyway," in a bad suit.

exactly

[pdub]

Trust me bro.

[ousdahl]

well we sure could clear up any doubt in a hurry, if we just got the link to that OnlyFans

[Shirley]

Jimmy Carter set the bar for former Presidents:



"I said, 'Pa Pa, you know I can't -- people ask me how you're doing and I say, I don't know. And he said, 'Well, I don't know myself.'"
- Jason Carter, Jimmy Carter's oldest grandson


John Pavlovitz
@johnpavlovitz

That Evangelicals rejected Jimmy Carter and worship Donald Trump shows you they really don’t give a shit about Jesus or his teachings.

^^^

It's true, by the time Carter ran against Gerald Ford in the '76 election, Republicans were already politicizing religion, and weaponizing it against Democrats.
"Moral Majority", my ass.

[jfish26]

We may never again have a President whose life after office is as fundamentally ordinary as Carter's.

[DrPepper]

Can you explain that? I think Obama, Trump, or anyone else could if they wanted to put away the golf clubs and speaking engagements and, instead, teach Sunday School and build houses for the homeless. Is it anything more than a choice and some security guards?

[Sparko]

We may never again have a President whose life after office is as fundamentally ordinary as Carter's.

Or as unappreciated at the time of his presidency. Egypt-Israel. Stealth. Human Rights and Solidarity bringing about the conditions of the end of the Warsaw Pact, commitments to green energy, and more. But the Shah, the Post-Vietnam recession, and the rise of the Christian Nationalist GOP pretty much guaranteed he would be one term. External factors had to run their course.

[jfish26]

Can you explain that? I think Obama, Trump, or anyone else could if they wanted to put away the golf clubs and speaking engagements and, instead, teach Sunday School and build houses for the homeless. Is it anything more than a choice and some security guards?

But that's sort of what I mean - I have a hard time seeing someone who aspires for an ordinary post-Presidency seeking (let alone obtaining) the office in the first place.

[Shirley]

Some people might say: "Extraordinary":

Jimmy Carter took on the awful Guinea worm when no one else would — and he triumphed

Jimmy Carter took great pride in pointing out that the United States didn't start any new wars during his term as president. But after he left office he launched a war against "neglected" diseases — diseases in far-off lands that most Americans will never suffer from and may not have even heard of. Diseases like lymphatic filariasis, trachoma, river blindness, schistosomiasis ... and a nasty little bug called Guinea worm disease.

Guinea worms are spread through contaminated drinking water and eating undercooked fish. The female worms, which can be up to 3 feet long once they mature, cause incredibly painful, open blisters usually on the infected person's lower legs and feet – through which the worms emerge. It can take a toll for weeks or months, and sometimes permanently, leaving the individual unable to support a family.



And if someone with Guinea worm has contact with water – perhaps to cool the burning pain caused by the worm's emergence – the worm will release tens of thousands of baby worms, contaminating the whole body of water.

The effort to end this disease did not rely on high-tech methods. Kelly Callahan, a public health worker who spent years fighting Guinea worm disease in southern Sudan with the Carter Center, says: "Guinea worm disease has no cure, no vaccination, basically the entire eradication effort is built on behavior change."

That's meant teaching people in vulnerable areas to filter their water and giving them the low-cost tools to do so.

Other strategies included providing access to safe water supplies; better detection of human and animal cases; cleaning and bandaging of wounds; preventing infected people and animals from wading into water and the use of a larvicide to kill the worms.

Case numbers attest to Carter's success
Because of Carter, the world has come incredibly close to wiping out Guinea worm.



"I would like to see Guinea worm completely eradicated before I die," Carter said at a press conference in 2015. "I'd like for the last Guinea worm to die before I do. I think right now we have 11 cases. We started out with 3.6 million cases."

And it did look as if the last Guinea worm was going to die before the 39th U.S. president. Then a few years ago, scientists discovered that the parasite was spreading among stray dogs in Chad – and that baboons in Ethiopia were also carrying the parasite. This long-overlooked reservoir of the worms was a setback for the global eradication program and showed that killing the last guinea worm was going to be harder than previously thought.

"When you take on a problem like this, like Guinea worm, you have to sweet talk the ministry officials, the political figures, the nurses, the doctors, the community activists, the farmers, the people who are ... most at risk. Carter's had to sweet talk all those people. And that's something that's been very inspiring to many of us."

[...]

[KUTradition]

in my previous employment i did quite a bit of research on NTDs, and whether they’d be suitable targets for one type of therapy or another

most of the Northern Hemisphere has very little clue about the “bugs” one might get in the tropics…that’ll all change in the next 50-100 years. “whitey” is in for a rude awakening

[jfish26]

Some people might say: "Extraordinary":

Jimmy Carter took on the awful Guinea worm when no one else would — and he triumphed

Jimmy Carter took great pride in pointing out that the United States didn't start any new wars during his term as president. But after he left office he launched a war against "neglected" diseases — diseases in far-off lands that most Americans will never suffer from and may not have even heard of. Diseases like lymphatic filariasis, trachoma, river blindness, schistosomiasis ... and a nasty little bug called Guinea worm disease.

Guinea worms are spread through contaminated drinking water and eating undercooked fish. The female worms, which can be up to 3 feet long once they mature, cause incredibly painful, open blisters usually on the infected person's lower legs and feet – through which the worms emerge. It can take a toll for weeks or months, and sometimes permanently, leaving the individual unable to support a family.



And if someone with Guinea worm has contact with water – perhaps to cool the burning pain caused by the worm's emergence – the worm will release tens of thousands of baby worms, contaminating the whole body of water.

The effort to end this disease did not rely on high-tech methods. Kelly Callahan, a public health worker who spent years fighting Guinea worm disease in southern Sudan with the Carter Center, says: "Guinea worm disease has no cure, no vaccination, basically the entire eradication effort is built on behavior change."

That's meant teaching people in vulnerable areas to filter their water and giving them the low-cost tools to do so.

Other strategies included providing access to safe water supplies; better detection of human and animal cases; cleaning and bandaging of wounds; preventing infected people and animals from wading into water and the use of a larvicide to kill the worms.

Case numbers attest to Carter's success
Because of Carter, the world has come incredibly close to wiping out Guinea worm.



"I would like to see Guinea worm completely eradicated before I die," Carter said at a press conference in 2015. "I'd like for the last Guinea worm to die before I do. I think right now we have 11 cases. We started out with 3.6 million cases."

And it did look as if the last Guinea worm was going to die before the 39th U.S. president. Then a few years ago, scientists discovered that the parasite was spreading among stray dogs in Chad – and that baboons in Ethiopia were also carrying the parasite. This long-overlooked reservoir of the worms was a setback for the global eradication program and showed that killing the last guinea worm was going to be harder than previously thought.

"When you take on a problem like this, like Guinea worm, you have to sweet talk the ministry officials, the political figures, the nurses, the doctors, the community activists, the farmers, the people who are ... most at risk. Carter's had to sweet talk all those people. And that's something that's been very inspiring to many of us."

[...]

"Ordinary" was a poor choice of words on my part.

What I'm getting at is that Carter has generally sought neither* celebrity (like Clinton and Obama) nor recluse (like Bush). There's an ordinariness to that approach that I find admirable and, probably, lost.

* To say nothing of, you know, insisting without evidence that actually he beat Reagan, and inciting an insurrection on those false assertions.