“But the chief factors influencing the quality of the coverage were the ones present in Vietnam, and present in any war: ignorance, confusion, inexperience, deadlines, excitement, competition, and the reliance, because there was no choice, on sources that may not prove to be trustworthy. (Taken together: an argument, again, for humility.) Even Colin Powell, the secretary of state, had not fully known what was going on—he made the case for war to the United Nations, unaware that some of the evidence provided by his own government was at best flawed and at worst manufactured. But everything could have been on the level, and there’d still be this: Nothing works out as planned (“Mission Accomplished”), even if you think it did.”
If you go to libraries and if you shop at Thriftbooks (both of which I recommend) then you may already know this fact. But if you don’t, let me enlighten you;
These places are breeding grounds for BED BUGS.
No this is not me telling you to stop. No this is not me calling that places dirty or gross. This is just the consequence of book sharing. Because these books trade hands and houses in a wonderful and perfect system of intellectual freedom. And I think that’s beautiful. But when a book trades houses that many times it’s prone to pick up something. That something is usually bed bugs.
Due to their natural structuring, books are ideal homes. And once a book returns to the library or the warehouse, these bedbugs wiggle out and find more places to burrow and breed.
And here’s another fun fact. Unlike ants, bed bugs are not social insects. They don’t like each other. So if you think you can just put down a single trap and catch them all, you’re wrong. They don’t work like that. If you poison one, it won’t go home and do a secret handshake with a hundred other of its friends. It’ll just die. If you kill one, you’ve only killed one.
Why am I telling you this? To scare you? To ward you away? Of course not. I’m just here to make sure you’re aware AND to introduce you to something that could save you a shit ton of grief.
The moment you bring the book home or take it out of its packaging, PUT THAT FUCKER INTO THE FREEZER.
NO. THAT’S NOT A JOKE. MOVE THE LEAN CUISINE OUT OF THE WAY AND POP THAT SUCKER INTO THE FREEZER!!!
Extreme cold and extreme heat kills bed bugs. And since we’re not Trump and holding book burnings is generally looked down upon, we do the next best thing. Freeze it. No, it won’t damage the book. A few days in there will only leave it cold and bug free. But if you’re worried, pop it into a large Ziplock before you do.
Read safe and stay bug free, my bookish friends! 📚📚📖
Holy shit that’s good advice
Take it from a survivor…. Bed bugs are a world of grief you want no part of.
Freezing things is actually an official museum-approved way to kill bugs!
It needs to have an internal temperature of -20C for four days to kill anything living in it, if you want to be specific.
Some ways to identify if something has bed bugs in it, or has had bed bugs:
One: there will be little brown/black spots on it. In a book, they’ll particularly be close to the spine, usually on the inside of the cover or within the first and last few pages. Bed bugs usually hide in the spine, and it’s easiest for one to crawl between the pages closest to whatever surface the book is set down on. (Yes. Even a closed book. These fuckers can make themselves flat.) On clothing or furniture, check seams and under cushions.
Two: The smell. Go smell a sprig of cilantro/coriander. Got that scent in your head? Good. Bed bugs smell mostly like that. A little more oily/musty, but basically cilantro. Particularly when squished, but honestly even a lone living bed bug has that distinctive smell. So, get up close and personal with the item. If it smells suspiciously like musty cilantro, it’s likely there are bed bug(s).
Three: Look for shed skins. They’re generally pale yellow in colour and kinda apple seed shaped.
Oh, heat also works to kill bed bugs. Sustained temps over 113F/45C will kill them. If you heat something to 118F/48C for 90 minutes, not only will you kill all the bed bugs, but you will also kill any eggs that may be on the item. Which means you can leave it bagged – preferably in black plastic – and either outside or in your car with the windows up on a hot day (depends how hot it is, obviously). Or you can put the item in the clothes dryer, if suitable. (I’ve also had some success with using the oven, but that comes with like a million caveats so I am not comfortable casually recommending it on Tumblr.)
Oh, and if it’s something you own and you’re willing to wait, they do sell bed bug poison. Basically you pop the poison filled thingy in a bag with the infested item(s) and wait out the time recommended by the manufacturer. Takes a couple weeks, generally, but if you’re leery about heat or cold treatment for whatever reason, or have more items you think may have bugs than you have freezer space and it’s too cold to stick it outside, it works. (But if you skimp on the time I will personally come to your house and smack you upside the head because do you wANT POISON IMMUNE BED BUGS BECAUSE THAT IS HOW YOU MAKE THEM.)
Oh and yeah if you’re using cold it’s gotta be at least 0F/-20C for 4 days. So I’d recommend checking your freezer’s temperature before going this route. They aren’t generally set that cold, but can usually be adjusted.
Last summer I went over to a friend’s house who had had bed bugs, sat on his bed, and then went back to my house. He’d told me about the bed bugs previously, and had made sure to not have anyone over ‘til they were taken care of. But he found a few after that, which made me incredibly paranoid after hearing about everything he had to do to get rid of them. I did some research of my own after that, so I have a few things to add to this that haven’t been mentioned.
1) Bed bugs feed only on blood. The common type feeds specifically on human blood. So if you have them, they’ll be going after you or other people in the house. From what I understand, they’re not very likely to go after pets. They can survive for a number of months without feeding.
2) IIRC, they generally prefer soft fabric-y stuff for nesting material. So not just bed mattresses, but pillows, (under the) carpet, clothes, stuffed animals. Paper or woody stuff also seems like a habitat of choice, which is why they’re found in books, and sometimes furniture close to beds, and box springs.
3) If you do have a bed bug infestation, it can take a while to become noticeable. As I understand it, if it’s gotten to the point where it’s noticeable (AKA you’re finding signs of bed bugs), it’s been there for a while, probably at least a couple months (this has to do with the time frames of the stages of bed bug life and breeding/laying eggs). Sometimes, people show symptoms like marks from bed bug bites, but some people don’t get those symptoms.
4) Even if you do bring a (few) bed bug(s) into your home, it may not develop into an infestation. For an infestation to develop, there must be a pregnant female bed bug. It can’t be a male, and it can’t be a non-pregnant female. Of course, the chance of an infestation occurring increases with the number of bed bugs, but if you’ve brought only a few into your home, an infestation may not develop for the reason just mentioned.
5) Initially, bed bugs pick a single site to start a colony. They hide there during the day, and leave at night to find food. The colony is typically very near to a food source, so they don’t travel far from it. As mentioned in previous posts on this thread, signs of bed bugs are things like dark reddish stains from bed bug droppings, darker colored droppings themselves, the smell (which I’ve heard described as slightly sweet when it becomes stronger), shed skins and, of course, actual bed bugs (dead or live). As the number of bed bugs increases, the colony becomes larger, and eventually bed bugs will start to migrate from the initial colony to find a place to form a new colony.
6) For treating things that you suspect may have bed bugs, in addition to the methods mentioned in previous posts on this thread, you can put things in the dryer and run it on high heat for a long cycle. This should be hot enough to kill any bed bugs and bed bug eggs. It’s probably best to only do this with things that can safely withstand the heat and the tumbling around. I’ve only done this with fabric-y stuff, not woody stuff like books.
7) If you’re not comfortable with just checking yourself, an exterminator can check for bed bugs. Alternatively, bed bug sniffing dogs are starting to be used. I’ve read that such dogs are more accurate than human inspectors. A key concern for using dogs, however, is the potential for false positives. Depending on how they are trained, sometimes these dogs are rewarded with food (even in the form of their normal meals in some cases) or toys in their training, which can lead them to respond as though there are bed bugs even when there aren’t so they can get the reward. So if you want to use a pest company that utilizes bed bug sniffing dogs, it’s important to know how their dogs are trained. If possible, I’d also recommend using a company that utilizes more than one dog in a search, which reduces the possibility of false positives.
Hopefully these points will further help people identify a bed bug infestation and/or alleviate some concern about whether you have an infestation. I was lucky and didn’t bring any bed bugs back with me from my friend’s house, but I definitely understand how stressful and anxiety-provoking the thought of having to deal with an infestation can be, because of everything you have to do to get rid of them and make sure they’re really gone, especially since they can be very resilient.
Yeah, I got one of Tumblr’s you-may-have-unwittingly-interacted-with-propaganda-blogs emails too. And like everyone else, I kind of shrugged because really, what am I supposed to do about that now? I have search disabled on my blog, and my tags are a mess; there’s no way I could go through and actually find any of the propaganda I may have inadvertently boosted over the seven years I’ve been on this site.
But out of curiosity I looked over Tumblr’s list of IRA-linked blogs. And one username stood out to me. I recognised it because for several months last year it had been showing up constantly in my notifications after I reblogged one of their posts with a response.
When I first saw the post by black-to-the-bones, I wanted to know more about these women. I dug up the original Tweet, ran a reverse Google image search and… well, as you can see from my reblog, there turned out to be quite a lot of information about them on the internet, which I spent the next hour or two collating into my post.
Now, don’t get me wrong here: I am one hundred percent aware that history regularly erases the contributions of women, and especially women of colour. But as you can see from my reply, in this particular case the history of these three women absolutely is not “hidden from us”. The person attempting to hide these women’s history was black-to-the-bones themself.
The original post – which we now know was posted by a state-sponsored propaganda blog – took a legitimate issue, but misrepresented facts to stir up emotion about that issue. The issue was perfectly tailored to resonate with Tumblr’s culture of social justice, and it worked. The vast majority of reblogs of the original post do not include any correction or further information.
Again, don’t get me wrong: anger is important. It’s a necessary part of social justice. But we have clear evidence that bad-faith actors are intentionally fomenting false anger to keep us reacting emotionally rather than thinking rationally. And they are smart about it. They will mix in their attempts to divide and enrage us with innocuous cute videos to gain followers, and legitimate posts about issues. So that when they do post actual misinformation, it slips under our radar.
When propaganda blogs do something like try to smear a Jewish woman as a white supremacist, it’s obvious who their target is, and what their goal is. But I wanted to highlight the black-to-the-bones post above because it’s a subtler, more insidious kind of propaganda. It’s part of a continuum of tactics designed to keep up a constant background noise of outrage.
Because while anger is important, constant anger makes it harder for us to empathise with each other. It makes it harder for us to be constructive, rather than destructive. And ultimately, it just exhausts us and leaves us too apathetic to care.
So getting back to my original question: What are we supposed to do about that now?
Fact. Check. Everything.
Your racist grandparents aren’t the only ones being targeted by fake news. We are being targeted with posts that are specifically designed to appeal to Tumblr’s social justice culture. So if you see a post about an issue that makes you angry, stop before you reblog. Check the source. Google the details. Make sure your anger about legitimate issues isn’t being exploited by malicious actors.
Propaganda like this relies on us reacting to outrage before we stop to think. Be smarter than that. Don’t let yourself be manipulated.
This dovetails nicely with something I’ve been noticing recently on tumblr – and is also mentioned briefly in the post above. Accusations of bigotry and other “no-nos” from a social justice mindset are being weaponized.
There’s a good foundation for it, because there’s a real need for people to know who the actual bigots are so they can avoid interacting with them and make their online experience safer. However, what’s being exploited is, as noted above, the habit – specifically here on tumblr – of taking what’s said at face value without checking it.
This kind of thing takes advantage of a lack of critical thinking skills. There’s been a deliberate movement within public education of removing critical thinking skills from the syllabus. They’re not being taught. I graduated high school in 1995, and I get the impression that I was part of the last group being publicaly educated whose curriculum included critical thinking skills. I’ve also been through college twice now – once in the late 90s, and one again in the 2010s – and neither experience included critical thinking skills, because it was assumed that they had already been taught at the primary/high school level.
Now, there could be all sorts of reasons for this – it could be, like music and the arts, something discarded in order to preserve what’s considered the “core” of public education as school budgets continued to get slashed. Or it could have been a deliberate move on the government’s part, to create a populace that is easily manipulated by propaganda. If it is the second reason, then I suspect that the U.S. government didn’t take into account that it would create a populace not just easily manipulated by U.S. government propaganda, but also easily manipulated by propaganda from foreign powers.
This lack of critical thinking skills is why, for example, Fox News has been able to gain traction with people from more groups than just the racist grandpas and grandmas. And it’s why people see an accusation of bigotry (racism, TERFs, misogyny, antisemitism, homophobia, etc) on tumblr and take it at face value, without at least checking both blogs involved (the one doing the accusation and the one being targeted) to see if there’s a deeper agenda at work, such as a conflict between the two and a smear campaign attempt.
It’s also why Russian propaganda has been so effective.
The good news is, there are a large amount of resources online to help you learn critical thinking skills. You don’t have to depend on it being part of your school curriculum – you can learn it on your own.
“If it is the second reason, then I suspect that the U.S. government
didn’t take into account that it would create a populace not just easily
manipulated by U.S. government propaganda, but also easily manipulated
by propaganda from foreign powers.”
I mean it’s just like what I’ve been screaming into the void about the “don’t ask questions, just apologize, just believe whatever someone screams at you because they’re from a sufficiently oppressed demographic group” style of SJ discourse…
If it will work on somebody coming from you? It’ll work on them coming from somebody else.
(I wouldn’t say that I believe that the US government is actively trying to prevent the acquisition of critical thinking skills, but geez, sometimes it’s hard to tell. I definitely remember being explicitly taught things like “how do you tell a fact from an opinion?” and to be extra careful when encountering absolutist, categorical statements, in first grade, but sometimes it seems like not very many people have been since then.)
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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