Libra00

If Israel didn’t have diplomatic cover by way of the US’s security council veto it might, but yeah.

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The world needs a lot fewer nuclear weapons, preferably zero, to be sure. But nobody seems particularly keen on giving them up, and if Israel has them Palestine - even if it becomes a state - will always live in the shadow of Israel’s military power.

I’m glad we have the UN to state the obvious (and then do literally nothing about it.) So helpful.

(I know the person in question is just doing their job, but.)

Don’t go near animals.

Animals breathe, just like we do, they can expel airborne viruses that can travel for hundreds, perhaps even thousands of miles. ‘Don’t go near animals’ is like saying ‘just don’t get wet’ in a rain storm: the world is full of animals and they utterly suffuse every aspect of our life in ways that might surprise you.

Vaccines work using either diluted toxins

I don’t know what ‘diluted toxins’ has to do with viruses and immunology since toxins are a rather different matter entirely, but vaccines work (the non-mRNA ones anyway) by infecting you with a weakened version of the virus so that your immune system can learn to identify it without it overwhelming you. Once it learns to identify that disease it will know how to produce proteins and such that can attack the full version (same DNA) should you ever come across it.

The immune system works by enough of the population dying off until only those with the necessary mutations are left.

Let me state in the sincerest possible terms: lolwut?

It’s not about mutation, the immune system can ‘learn’ and ‘evolve’ over the course of a single human’s lifetime (see: the description of how vaccines work above), it’s not something that you either have a good one or you don’t (autoimmune diseases aside) and the people with bad ones don’t live long enough to reproduce or whatever, your immune system - like your brain - learns by exposure. So being exposed to those diseased animals is literally the only means by which to become immune to them. Viruses do mutate pretty quickly though, so you get the occasional plague/pandemic that overwhelms people’s immune systems when they change enough to not be recognizable to our immune system anymore.

Humans need to go close to the infected animal to get infected.

To some extent yes, but ‘get close to’ is pretty broad: breathe contaminated air in the general vicinity of animals, drink water they’ve pissed or shit in, etc.

Oh, so being exposed to new viruses reduces the risk of dying to a virus you got … because you were exposed to it?

That is in fact how a vaccine/our immune system works, yes.

Nearly all of history’s worst diseases have come from animals, and animals have those diseases whether we eat them or not. Factory farming certainly enhances the danger, but cows don’t stop existing just because we don’t eat beef. There is, however, also an upside to meat consumption: being around/eating animals all the time also builds up your immune system’s defenses against diseases that originate in those animals. See: indigenous people in the Americas dying in droves to diseases they had no immunity to because they didn’t farm/ranch animals. I mean and also the smallpox blankets, but you get my point.

If the virus originated in a wide area around Yunnan/Hubei (the latter of which is where Wuhan is) then it seems pretty unlikely that it came from a single source within Wuhan, right? I agree that the headline might be a bit ambiguous, but it’s like saying ‘It came from all over Texas’ vs ‘It came specifically from El Paso.’ But I haven’t read the study myself.

Oh, my bad, I didn’t even notice the ‘no thanks’ button. Thanks.

No doubt, but as a mechanism of applying pressure to get them to stop invading Ukraine, I think you’ll have to agree that it’s failed miserably. That’s what I (and most people) mean by ‘working’: accomplishing the intended aim. Huge problems or not, the war continues unabated. Why do you imagine doing more of the same would be any more effective?

Link just takes me to a website that says ‘Enter your email.’

Respectfully: No.

Why? Primary sanctions didn’t. The US and Europe effectively crashed out of Russia’s economy for the most part; they lost access to Western banking, Western businesses abandoned Russia in droves, and the oil and gas sales to Europe that Russia is heavily dependent upon have been significantly reduced. Yet they seem to be doing fine, so what’s left?

Also, why on earth would China walk away from trade with Russia? It’s pretty clear the US-led world order of trade is falling apart and China hasn’t been the one begging for trade deals over here, they seem fine to just write us off and go on about their business elsewhere in the world, I doubt they would have any compunction about doing the same to Europe if it came to that (which I doubt it will.)

Haven’t Western nations already been applying significant sanctions to Russia? It’s pretty clear that hasn’t been working, why do they imagine that more of the same will work any better? Oh right, they don’t, they just want to look like they’re doing something useful.

I’m guessing they mean ‘half of 145%’, but yeah that headline is a hot mess.

Posting it without comment or indication that it’s misleading is treating it as reliable, or at least as reliable as any other news article posted here.

Obviously Trump is a fire hose of bullshit that is not shy about spewing bullshit, but if you just drop stuff here without comment we have no choice but to assume that it should be given the same weight as any other article. ‘Do your homework’ applies to both the poster and the reader.

Sorry, are we under the impression that Israel after killing north of 50,000 people, most of whom are children, is in any way civilized? I guess that’s what delusion will do for you.