Land of a Thousand Outbreaks

 

We've been looking at the avian flu situation for a few years, so I guess what I want people to know about what we are looking at with respects to future outbreaks or epidemic situations, what we have got is not a "plandemic" in the conspiracy-fueled mindset of people who feel like masks and vaccines and the like are social control mechanisms fueled by some Big Pharma control or whatever.  You know who has cared about avian flu? People who care about birds. We used to have a birdfeeder out back of Strangely Estates. Then, we realized it might not be a great idea to have random birds congregating together if we couldn't regularly ensure we were cleaning out old feed, rinsing off poo, etc. 

We still have the birdbath up. It's heated. We get starlings, cardinals, jays. I don't know if it's a good thing or not. I understand there's a lot of risk with avian flu re: waterfowl. I look forward to the seasonal influx of geese along the Delaware. I don't want to see what I think we will. There's a good chance H5N1 and H5N9 are everywhere. This is why there are higher egg prices and massive bird livestock culls--but we are also seeing H5N1 in dairy cattle herds. 

MTG is Showing her Panties Again

 

She blinded me with science!!! pic.twitter.com/oCKdfkJQzo

— Congressman Jared Moskowitz (@RepMoskowitz) June 3, 2024

Behold, Marjorie Taylor Greene, 

conspiracy theorist, drama queen, 

lacking attention and growing bored 

decided SHE WOULD NOT BE IGNORED!

So, she decided to pick some bones

(using crap she got from Alex Jones)

with Dr. Fauci--it wasn't pretty.

her duel of wits unarmed, a pity!

She subjects herself to ridicule

with a grasp of facts so miniscule

that in a feckless hunt for witches

she revealed herself the worst of--

people to have ever been in congress!

She made the hearing a total farce

because she had to show her arse,

causing her bleach blonde wig to flip

all to earn her soggy potato chip. 

No Pill's Gonna Cure My Ill

As the DeSantis administration rails against the FDA decision to limit use of monoclonal antibody treatments made by Regeneron and Eli Lilly, worth noting both companies say they agree with the feds that these drugs aren’t effective against omicron.

Regeneron left, Lilly right: https://t.co/3QWxqDC4zC pic.twitter.com/3vDj4ojWjm

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) January 25, 2022

Even if I can't quite put my finger on why Governor DeSantis became convinced that Regeneron was going to be a major part of his herd immunity strategy, it's clear that there never was a "magic pill" that would get us through the pandemic. For one thing, new variants might not respond well to previously developed treatments, but also, natural immunity from prior infection appears to wane. 

The facts don't matter to DeSantis (any more than facts care about his feelings or political ambitions), so he will moan that the FDA is the villain for telling him what he does not want to hear. But the FDA (and the companies that make the treatments in question) are only following the science. 

As with blaming Fauci, for, well, everything, there is a temptation to put a human face on the pandemic to give people someone to lash out at. It's the pharmaceutical industry's fault (although why this is a "them" problem regarding vaccines and not antiviral medications, I'm not certain), it's the big bad nanny state's fault for wanting mandates that impose on "freedoms". Part of that is just political posturing, but I do think there is also a psychological desire for the there to be a face to punch when COVID-19, invisible to the naked eye, has no face, or a body to imprison for the high volume of deaths, when COVID-19 hasn't got an ass to toss in the clink.

There was never going to be an easy solution, but what DeSantis is showing is a public performance to mask incompetent public policy. But I do not think he is a good enough actor to really do that. 

UPDATE: Apparently, DeSantis' surgeon general will be facing tough questions over his competency, which sounds about right.

UPDATE: More Republican performance over drugs that don't work. 

Lara Logan's Grotesque Agenda

 

Fox host Lara Logan says that people tell her that Dr. Fauci doesn't represent science, but represents Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor known as the "Angel of Death" for performing medical experiments at Auschwitz: "I am talking about people all across the world are saying this" pic.twitter.com/fF2DAWfG7d

— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) November 30, 2021

Fox News has amply demonstrated over the years that they don't give a fuck if what they put out into the ether is even news: they exist as a propaganda racket, and their decision to give a berth to Lara Logan after her 60 Minutes Benghazi debacle demonstrates their concerns regarding journalistic integrity. (No one escapes whipping regarding how Benghazi was covered, but Logan's failure to vet was very concerning.) 

They gave Lara Logan a show and let it be called Lara Logan Has No Agenda in the po-faced tradition of feigning "fair and balanced" coverage. 

You know, unlike those "mainstream media" assholes that unload whackadoodles like Logan after fuckups. (But to be fair, Fox News eventually unloads whackadoodles too, and they go to OAN or Newsmax or whatever. It's the circle of life.) After all, Fox's claim is that the other guys are too liberal and you should get the real news from straight-talkers like folks at Fox who, I guess, don't bother checking facts if a story is too good not to pass on. 

Now, I'm not calling Logan batshit because I have respect for what she used to be, and I get that she has been through some shit. I'm calling her a propagandist because she's given up on journalistic standards entirely and has decided to be no better than one's wine-sotted Facebook aunt forwarding bottom-of-the barrel conspiracy theories about antifa and now Dr. Fauci. 

Look at the language she's using--comparing Fauci to an actual monster of the Holocaust--what actions is she talking about? What research, what actual practices have put people at harm? Holocaust analogies are intentionally incendiary and also insulting to the real victims of that horror. She is using inflammatory language to liken Fauci to a person who did known, documented horrific things, but she never says what exactly Fauci did that she has a problem with. And she says people "all across the world" are saying this. Who? And why are they saying it, and why is she so emphatically co-signing? 

Or are these "people" as meaningful as the "some people are saying" that fabulists like Trump use to back up their nonsense? 

Here's the grotesque thing: the Republican Party wants to consider the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic as a failure on the part of the current Democratic presidential administration. They are fully comfortable slandering legitimate scientists and demeaning legitimate science to do this. Take the case of Two-Faced Nancy Mace, who went on Fox this Sunday to tell us that she thinks natural immunity (i.e, catching COVID-19) is best. It's not, and it isn't what she said elsewhere. 

I mean, who is actually fighting against people getting vaccinated?  And Fox News has been right there with them, being entirely full of shit. And who even knows the damage they have done and the lives lost because they have a grotesque agenda--that might require some sacrifice (human lives to Covid-19) in the service of a greater good (Republicans get a narrative that Biden can't fix Covid-19 by ensuring that the problem stays very real). 

People can ask what ever happened to Lara Logan, but I don't. Shit certainly has happened to her, but what she's doing now is a choice, and you can take it to the bank because as wild as she sounds, she's serving the Fox News agenda.  And I don't have to compare her to Goebbels to point out that lying so casually about life and death matters leads to more death--should it have to be said? 

She hasn't lost her mind--she just sold her soul. It's hardly news, these days. 

UPDATE: Witness: 

It's Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. And they are okay with their own folks dying from it. I can't pretend it doesn't disturb me. But I also can't pretend it isn't real when I'm looking right at it.