Those poor people. Just… WTF, Saudi Arabia… Get your shit together.
8 Likes
9 Likes
7 Likes
7 Likes
6 Likes
About an hour ago I dropped my freshly cooked dinner on the floor. I’m coping now, but I think I chain swore for five minutes.
15 Likes
11 Likes
Save the pot-bellied elephants! 
9 Likes
I think I need a mini-elephant as a support animal. That will make my next flight fun!
5 Likes
7 Likes
8 Likes
Navy SEALs have disproportionately been dying by suicide …
… with a similar pattern: Each seemed healthy until their early 40s, when — abruptly — a host of severe mental health issues arose
One wife suspected brain damage, and had her husband’s brain quickly frozen
She unlocked it all
it’s a new form of damage caused by repeated exposure to small blasts
You can read about her story in this superb investigation by Dave Phillips in the New York Times;
gift link here: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/30/us/navy-seals-brain-damage-suicide.html?unlocked_article_code=1.3k0.DGwe.i3OzX90az7c6&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb
16 Likes
Wasn’t this suspected in the recent case of the Lewiston shooter (Robert Card), who was a long-time instructor at an Army hand grenade training range?
5 Likes
Yeah, there’s going to be a hell of a lot of “okay… now what?”
- Some kind of testing for vets, and what do you do about brain injuries like that?
- Review and revision of training exercises.
- Possibly protective gear?
7 Likes
Could this be picked up on an MRI? And I don’t have any idea what kind of gear would protect against this - it would have to be something that wouldn’t conduct the shockwave from the explosion but still be wearable without impairing things like vision and hearing.
4 Likes
From the NYT story:
When Mr. Collins returned to the couple’s home in Virginia Beach, doctors scanned his brain with magnetic resonance imaging but found nothing abnormal.
Maybe now that they know what to look for? 
4 Likes
It’s entirely possible that knowing what to look for won’t help if it doesn’t show up on the resolution and type of scanning that’s possible without pithing the patient.
CTE is fairly well known, even if they’re still figuring out the edges of how much trauma triggers it, and how badly. But that can only be surmised until the official diagnosis… and the unequivocal detection of the characteristic damage and exclusion of other causes can only be done at autopsy, via a microtome.
4 Likes
I hope that they find some kind of test or measurement.
If they don’t know, even unaffected people are going to suffer horrible dread from any normal absent-mindedness.
I guess the stolen valor types will have to find something else to claim to be.
1 Like
They’re working on it, but it’s a hard problem.
5 Likes
