Bozo_Casanova

I don’t follow this point. What does a state sanctioned private monopoly have to do with market pricing or capitalism?

What I’m feeling when I read this must be what you feel when lay persons talk about the legal system. ;-)

Exactly. But for what it’s worth- literally every infection brings us closer. We’re not completely unprepared. H5N1 is a flu strain, and we know some things about flu. We can make vaccines that work pretty well. We have good tests. We know how to run an economy on remote workers. It doesn’t really spread asymptomatically, and masks/handwashing are quite effective at prevent transmission. But the required element unpinning any successful pandemic response is social cohesion because we have to act in concert and voluntarily comply with what we are asked to do. I can’t speak to that in the rest of the world, but in the US social cohesion and voluntary compliance are in short supply at the moment.

Or, maybe we should *only* put them on paper.

If you think that’s impressive, you should see him handle a bowl of soup.

I think you mean the people that Democrats stopped talking to or caring about politically after 2010.

That’s some name

Biden’s interview with Lester Holt is going about how you think. I’m watching so you don’t have to.

Talk to some Gen Zers about this, seriously. They feel like they are the big winners in this scenario.

You get elected to do things for the coalition that elects you. You don’t get to do things unless and until you win elections, and if you want to keep the ground you gain, you have to keep winning. True for people who want things to get worse also.

That’s pretty clearly not what he said, and any person who would ever consider voting for Donald Trump along with many who won’t will understand that. He’s pretty clearly saying that the sexual revolution and no-fault divorce were sold to the public on the basis of freeing people from violence and unhappiness, and while those benefits were realized they came at a cost of broadly negative social and economic consequences. Please don’t make me defend JD Vance.

I’m not going to defend JD Vance, but two things: 1) this is pretty clearly not what Vance is saying, the gist of which is that the the sexual revolution led to an explosion of divorce that has not been good for working families or middle class children on either a cultural or economic level. His audience will understand it. 2) second, he’s right. And I am certainly no fan of JD Vance or suggesting that people should stay in violent marriages. Affluent white progressives, who generally have the privilege of not living in economically depressed places or personally impacted by losing elections will no doubt jump all over this, and it will be wasted effort because they don’t understand the lived reality of middle class life in America. This biggest mistake Democrats have made in the last 35 years is not explicitly pushing economic policies that make single incomes viable for middle class families.

When I first went down the rabbit hole on this stuff in the early 2000s, an H5N1 pandemic was considered potentially devastating on a scale from merely horrible (50-100mm dead at the low end) to possibly apocalyptic, meaning 1-2B deaths and a partial collapse of civilization. So it's worth a closer look at the numbers I should add - the actual CFR for H5N1 is probably much lower, studies indicate something closer to 14-33%. That's compared to a CFR of 2.5% for the 1918 flu. The 1918 flu probably infected around 1/3 of the population and most estimates have it that about 60-75% of the global population has contracted COVID at least once. Conservatively, if 25% of the global population contracted H5N1 with a CFR of 14% that would be 294MM deaths globally, and about 12mm deaths in the US. 66% infection rate and a CFR of 33% would be 1.76B deaths globally, with 72MM American lives lost and a reordering of society, at the very least. Happy monday!

Well, untreated bubonic plague has a case-fatality ratio of 30-60%, and the case-fatality rate for reported cases of H5N1 in humans over the last 20 years has been 54%, so at the moment it appears to be in Black Death territory.

Oh hey, we have a human cluster.

He’ll run for SBOE, nobody has done more to protect SE Texans from viewing online porn.

Depends- suppressed subsonic .22LR that hits a hard spot on the skull may not penetrate or expand much.

Just watched again- could also be a pellet gun, but my guess is rimfire.

That sounded like a suppressed .22LR or .17HMR to me. Horrible. I hope I am wrong.

I would have to hear it, that could be either a gaffe or a power move.

Electricity is WOKE