I’d love be as optimistic as you but unless Trump changes his mind the US will get a brainwormed fanatical anti-vaccier in charge of deciding which vaccines are safe to use. Even if the states don’t cooperate with trump’s agenda there are so many long standing federal institutions which till now you’ve never needed to think about that are about to get wrecked.
Multiple regulatory bodies are going to get disbanded. The EPA is unlikely to survive, whole departments of the FDA are about to get gutted. Anything involving industrial safety is going to get its funding cut. Unconstitutional crackdowns on free and independent media is almost certain. Large scale damage to the functions of many government institutions can be expected. Massive economic damage due to reckless deregulation ( that’s even before they start putting tariffs on everything and wind up in multiple simultaneous trade wars). Funding for education and infrastructure maintenance will be reduced to allow tax cuts for the already wealthy. Massive loss of global influence and a massive gain in influence by hostile autocratic nations is also something you can expect.
I could go on and on but even if you were to assume they weren’t serious about project 2025 (if you haven’t read that you should) it’s real bad.
Space is big. It’s so big that our tiny ape brains have a hard time conceiving of how big it is. The sun is actually (despite it’s size) a relatively small target and is very very far away. Now the more delta-V you burn to slow the trash down the smaller its orbit around the sun will be. But that orbit starts enormous. So to get that purple line near the sun you do need to slow down almost the whole way, just to get it close.
Did you know that the Gazan bomb disposal teams are some of the most skilled in the world? The reason for this is so they can disarm and disassemble unexploded Israeli bombs so that the explosives can be repurposed and fired back. So a surprisingly large portion of the explosives that Hamas used were supplied by Israel via their long-term sporadic bombing of Gaza and anything resembling major infrastructure.
There’s a massive gulf between what progressives say and do and what the alt-right online influencers claim they do. Perhaps the reason you haven’t heard of anything productive progressives have done is that you get all your news from people who do not want them to appear reasonable and so leave out anything reasonable that they do. These days woke is a word used only by those trying to denigrate the progressive left. Because Woke is a strawman. An empty vessel for you to fill with hate. A totem to represent all the ways in which society is changing that you don’t like.
I can think of nothing less productive than putting down a hollow strawman.
Allow me to address a question the pro-Russian guy keeps dodging; Wagner is no longer participating in the Ukraine war. I don’t know the full details but after their mutiny, they were sent back to Africa and other foreign countries far from Russia and have been working to shore up Russian-friendly dictatorships and regimes. But they have been kept well away from Ukraine and Russia ever since. Part of what they’ve been doing is selling and advertising their services as consultants and support to keep people in power. This helps Russia build influence which is something it desperately needs right now. Wagner being in Venezuela would not be strange. It would mean the guy who is yelling about the CIA trying to overthrow him has accepted Russian help. In fact considering how active Wagner has been in involving themselves anywhere where they can get a foothold it’d be weird if Wagner weren’t in Venezuela.
Typically the major threats from canniblism are bacteria, viruses, fungus, parasites and prions. The bacteria, viruses, fungus and parasites shouldn’t exist under properly maintained lab conditions. But prions are just misfolded proteins. They happen rarely and typically they are quarantined in the cell they were produced in. A number of things have to go very, very wrong for them to get out into your body from your own cells. However, eating and digesting cells can let out the prions they contain. Once they get out they’ll start triggering other proteins to misfold but only if the right materials are present and if the prion came from human tissue you can be sure they are.
The human immune system is incredible, it has impressive countermeasures for almost anything you could think of. Heck it’ll even attack solid objects that get stuck inside you. If you get shot by a bullet and don’t get it removed (not recommended) your body will layer by layer eat that bullet. Slowly dissolving it and passing it into your blood so your kidneys can filter it and you can piss out that bullet over the course of decades. (Though having a bunch more metal in your blood causes its own problems). Your body has a response to just about everything including cancer which to get anywhere has to have some mutations to deceive your immune system.
Your body has no answer to prions whatsoever. Your body puts up no fight. If you are infected by a prion disease you are going to die. There is no vaccine, no cure, no treatment.
Once symptoms appear you’ll have at most a few years if your very lucky but more likely a few months. Most prion diseases attack the brain. (side note; don’t eat the brains of any animal regardless of circumstances)
Will perfectly sterile lab conditions eliminate prions as a concern? No If anything it might be possible that growing the meat artificially might result in more misfolded proteins. I’d still happily eat lab-grown animal meat. But lab-grown human meat? No thank you
The US and international pressure. So optics basically. Kind of like how they made ‘efforts’ at peace and a two-state solution over the past decades just to show they were trying. Those deals involved things like all the Isreali settlers remaining in Palestine, continuing to live under Isreali laws despite living in Palestine and for the IDF to be the defense and security forces for both countries. Or things like all the arable land going to Isreal and Palestine getting cut up into multiple enclaves.
Isreal has been obstructing aid from crossing the border for the longest time. The US even started airdropping stuff in because the Isreal was disrupting aid convoys from crossing into Palestine. They even had to start building a pier because Isreal wasn’t letting in any aid. After a lot of international pressure Isreal relented and stopped deliberately screwing up the aid convoys. Except the moment that happened settlers suddenly started knowing when and where every aid convoy was crossing into Palestine and started attacking them.
No, no it doesn’t. Suicide is a sin but Christianity absolutely glorifies self-sacrifice for the religion. I mean you’ve heard of martyrs right? It became a core tenant of the religion in the early roman days that dying for the faith gets you straight into heaven. Glorifying dying for the faith is a massive part of Christianity too. In Islam committing suicide is a sin unless you’re self-sacrificing yourself for the faith and dying for the faith also gets you straight into heaven. Just like in Christianity. They’re both Abrahamic faiths and have a lot of the same roots.
So yeah what the fuck are you talking about? They are no more self-sacrificing than anyone else. They’re just fucking people. They’re all just people. Why can’t we just treat them like people?
50% of the population of Gaza was under 18 based on Israeli numbers for Gaza prior to October. This means 50% of the population wasn’t even alive when that vote happened since it happened 18 years ago! Fun fact about that vote; Hamas represented themselves as significantly more moderate in the run-up to the election only to drop that the moment they got elected and murder all their political opposition. They have since continued to murder outspoken political dissidents and quash any efforts for new elections.
A twenty-year-old election that was run on lies tells us nothing about the feelings of the people of Gaza in the current day. It doesn’t tell us how much they support Hamas now and it certainly tells us nothing about how much they value their lives.
Though your twisted rationlisation tells me a lot about how you value their lives.
There is alot of things the government does for you that most people likely have never thought about. Take invasive species for instance; There are huge efforts to contain and eradicate a variety of invasive species. You’ve probably never heard about these efforts. But they are needed to maintain and protect both farmland and the ecology of the United States. If those efforts are defunded and those species are allowed to run rampant it’ll be almost impossible to put that genie back in the bottle.