exchemist

🦇 🐐 💩

You might be right about that. My guess is he may try to get the NY Times shut down. He's hated it for years. He can almost bankrupt it by court cases, tax investigations and so on - and then see it sold off to one of the tech bros: maybe Musk, or a milquetoast like Bezos. That will be a warning to the MSNBCs, CNNs etc. to play ball or face the consequences.

If you agree with me about gun culture, why are you dragging in these extraneous other issues?

Well Trump is a troll so it's quite funny he got trolled by Putin. Putin will be overjoyed at the result. Autocrats all over the world will see this result as confirmation that democracy - both in the US and more widely - is a weak and flabby system whose time is up. And there is no doubt it is in retreat now. I learned this splendid N American expression through a Canadian negotiator's commentary on the US/Canada trade talks, when Trump was in office before. A journalist texted this guy to ask how it was going and got a 2 two word reply: "goat rodeo". Invited to elaborate, he responded: "This. Is. A. Total. Goat rodeo." Very Canadian. 😁

No, I claim today's prize for tautology. 😁

Yup, the goat rodeo has begun already, earlier than even I thought it would. I’ll be fascinated to see what happens when they try to deport 2m (or is it more?) immigrants. To where? Will they dump the population of a large city, just across the Mexican border, without any agreement with the Mexican government? What will happen then? Then the tariffs will kick in, raising prices of imported goods and provoking a trade war on all sides that will cripple exports. Meanwhile, that 6-cylinder nutcase Kennedy will be charge of the nation’s health - a dead bear in every hospital, perhaps? Musk will try to sack a third of the nation’s civil servants, presumably starting with those responsible for protecting the public from unscrupulous business practices and then going on to disband the Dept of Education. That should lead to a better informed electorate, right? Trump will pardon himself for any crimes he is convicted of, if he can’t get the supine Supreme Court to overturn the verdicts. Putin is right: the USA is in decline. And so is democracy.

This seems to be meaningless word salad.

Here are the relevant stats for England and Wales (most of the UK): https://www.statista.com/statistics/1402232/england-and-wales-firearm-homicides/ The incidence of firearm homicides is pretty stable, at around 30/yr. If you add in a few more for Scotland and N Ireland you might get to 40. Presumably that it is the gun culture in the USA that makes these shootings such a regular and apparently accepted feature of American life.

One wonders from which side of the family you inherited the moron gene. 😁

The population of the USA is 335m, not 100m. Can you provide a reference to this GAD ranking system?

Yes of course money continues to be spent on covid countermeasures. I very much doubt if billions of public money is being spent on them in the USA. But drug companies will be sending a fair bit I expect, in the expectation that many countries' health systems will continue to need a pipeline of antivirals for a long time to come.

Sure. So in other words, we have now reverted to “normal” after the pandemic and no longer feel the need to divert huge sums of public money into crash development programmes, trials and so forth. From the article, I gained the impression that further antivirals can be expected in due time, no doubt stimulated by the emergence of the drug resistance referred to.

Because, as I say, we are not any longer in the middle of a global health emergency involving a largely unknown virus. We have a largely vaccinated population, our medical services are under a lot less pressure and we know a great deal more about the virus. So we can take our time and try to get better antivirals more deliberately than we could in the initial rush to get something out that worked.

In case you have not seen it, I thought this was rather good, for a bit of much needed light relief:

Does it? I read it, admittedly rather quickly, as explaining the issue of resistance and the limitations of any antiviral approach. That applies to the first antivirals just as much as subsequent ones. That is what the article, not I, seems to be saying. I most certainly did not say 2nd generation antivirals are harder to make than 1st generation ones.