Anecdotally, the price of eggs is off the chart, and I’ve seen more sickness in the first 6 weeks of the year than in a long time, pandemic notwithstanding. My nuclear family of four all got the flu. Even now I am not fully up to speed in terms of feeling tired a lot more quickly. It’s a bugger.
I dread to think what will happen if something scales up. Kennedy is a worm-brained idiot, and he gives succor to the normalization of a post-scientific world, where fringe and even lunatic approaches to health care are becoming acceptable.
On the upside, I can probably save myself $20k a year and ditch health insurance in favor of putting a few leeches on my wounds and eating more honey.
I have a morbid fascination with pandemics/epidemics, particularly the mathematics of them, but my grasp of the underlying science is not particularly good. All I really know is at the risk level when viruses jump genus/species walls, it is usually worse than the variants that human beings are accustomed to (viz. covid-19), when they jump classes we are even less prepared for them. So jumping from birds to mammals is already fairly high risk. Clearly, it is extremely effective at propogating among birds.
Yupp, that is what Pete Hegseth said indeed. That it makes no sense is not my fault. He said it now at Ramstein, in front of all of NATO’s defensive ministers (and a truck load of other ministers and experts). But I am supposed to take seriously imbeciles who defend the Trump admin…
I think, and I’m being more generous than I should, that he means most of the US Naval strength is currently deployed to defend South East Asia and that the US Navy doesn’t have the size or strength to fight in a European theatre at the same time.
True. Lots of money to be made off the back of military spending. Musk does the DOGE performance. He will probably even find a couple of coins down the back of the Pentagon sofa. But overall, it will be business as usual and Hegseth is signaling for a multi-year investment into the navy.
Even this is wrong. If there’s a modern navy that can fight simultaneously on two fronts, that’s the USN.
It can field 11 strike groups centred around its aircraft carriers. Russia’s single aircraft carrier is rotting away at Murmansk. There’s just no comparison between the two navies, at least when it comes to surface vessels.
Indeed, the insinuation otherwise has to be humiliating for many career Navy officers, particularly coming from a jumped-up National Guard weekend warrior. There will be some admirals delighted at the possibility of building more ships, but many will be livid at being selected as the force with the incapacity to face one of the strategic rivals they have been built and trained for their entire professional life
Maybe, but if the ships to be able to carry out one of the pillars of US strategic doctrine will take 8 years to build, maybe the guy who became President in 2016 should have done something about it?
Mr potato head is a good way to picture the flu virus. There are lots of structural components that have different variations and so the entire family of the virus represent the set of permutations of each of those choices that nature has selected and had work. Many of those structural variants have functional effects. So in essence it is possible to select a hat that makes it very good at infecting pigs, but less so at anything else. But if it had a different hat it would be good at infecting cows. And if it suddenly switched hats and found itself able to spread among cows its novelty in that population would generally make it very dangerous. The flu is of such concern because we know it is susceptible to those sort of costume changes. In theory every one of those changes is one that can make it more transmissible to and among humans, and so potentially introduce something novel we have little immunity against, similar to the first couple of years of covid.
This is also why the flu shot is a such a game of craps. It will be targeted to a small number of variants they have projected are likely to be in circulation and wont work anywhere near as well to protect against a different variants to starts spreading.
