Terse

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My latest cartoon for New Scientist

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Truly love this guy –> Peter Hotez, vaccine expert

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Opinion | What if They Gave a War and Everybody Was Woke?

The military’s embrace of faddish politics may make activists happy, but it’s driving away recruits.

The US Military values selflessness, courage, patriotism, sacrifice—not racial discrimination or activist politics. A military that abandons its apolitical role will have a harder time attracting large numbers of warriors and patriots to its ranks

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Opinion | Why Won’t the FDA Let Doctors Prescribe Fluvoxamine for Covid?

Trials show it keeps patients from getting sicker, but the agency won’t approve its emergency use.

Applications for new uses of generic drugs are reviewed under different standards than those for novel treatments.

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The international rally behind Ukraine is certainly something to behold. Yet despite the courage of the Ukrainian people behind their equall...

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Stand With Ukraine, organized by Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher

Today, I am a proud Ukrainian. While my family came to the United States in 1991, I … Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher needs your support for Stand With Ukraine

Yes we can help the brave people of Ukraine.

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What the right gets wrong about Putin | The Spectator

A fracture on the international right may seem small fry given everything that is going on right now. But it is worth loitering over. Because in recent years an interesting divide has grown among conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic. On one side are the Cold War warriors and their successors ...

“Part of what is going on here is known as ‘edgelording’, by which people spend most of their lives online revelling in saying the unsayable about the Holocaust, Putin and more. They may well know it to be wrong, but they get a quasi-sexual thrill from saying such things. Perhaps because it is the nearest thing to a sexual thrill they have ever known.” –– Douglas Murray

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How Russia is moving across Ukraine after claiming its first city

Vladimir Putin's forces are battling for control of a crucial energy-producing city in Ukraine's south as they bid to completely cut off the country from its vital links to the Black Sea.

Putin’s criminal siege tactics begin

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Shark advocates call for rebranding violent attacks as ‘interactions’

Marine advocates in Australia are urging the public to stop using “attack” in reference to sharks, saying that media has warped the reputation of the majestic predatory fish into that o…

“Mostly peaceful shark interactions”

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shares a message from Kyiv | USA ...

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Opinion | The Message of Canada’s Trucker Protest

They are saying that it’s time for the pandemic emergency orders to end.

FROM THE EDITORIAL BOARD | THE WALL STREET JOURNAL:

For two years the truckers were classified as “essential” workers and therefore exempt from vaccine mandates. An estimated 85% of them are vaccinated. Yet Liberal Party Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who heads a minority government, has chosen this moment to order that truckers be vaccinated if they want to cross back into the country from the U.S.

The Canadian left is sneering at the truckers and their supporters, suggesting they’re nothing more than right-wing Trumpians. Mr. Trudeau has smeared them as “a few people shouting and waving swastikas.” But the push-back against Covid-19 overreach has gone global. In January police fired water cannons at an estimated 50,000 European protesters in Brussels registering their exhaustion with restrictions and mandates. Since December protesters have gone to the streets elsewhere in Europe and in New Zealand and Australia….

The lesson for the Covid-19 police is that when you’ve lost even Canadians, arguably the most law-abiding people on the planet, you’ve lost the political plot. Time to adopt a new strategy more tolerant of the need to return to life not dominated by pandemic fear and government commands.

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What the Truckers Want

I’ve spoken to 100 of the protestors gathered in the Canadian capital. What's happening is far bigger than the vaccine mandates.

FROM RUPA SUBRAMANYA | COMMON SENSE:

They came from across the country. Vaxxed, unvaxxed, white, black, Chinese, Sikh, Indian, alone or with their wives and kids. They huddled around campfires. They set up pop-up kitchens and tents with block captains doling out coffee and blankets. They honked (and honked and honked). They blasted “We Are the World.” And everywhere you looked, someone was waving the Maple Leaf.

It dipped to 4 degrees. The mayor declared a state of emergency. And they didn’t budge.

The truckers were scared of running out of gas—freezing to death in their little truck beds in the middle of the night. The city threatened to arrest anyone who brought it to them. In response, hundreds of Ottawans did just that. The truckers stayed put.

They are a city inside a city whose inhabitants—there are an estimated 8,000 to 10,000—were outraged with a country that seemed to have forgotten they existed. This past Sunday, as if to confirm that suspicion, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has yet to meet with Freedom Convoy leaders, took a personal day. On Monday, during an emergency debate at the House of Commons, he called them “a few people shouting and waving swastikas.” ...

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'Early Covid mutations' from Chinese lab fuel lab leak theory

The theory that Covid leaked from a lab was given fresh momentum last night after scientists studying soil samples in Antarctica stumbled upon traces of unique versions of the virus.

FROM THE DAILY MAIL:

Professor Lawrence Young, a virologist at Warwick University who is a supporter of the natural origin theory, told MailOnline the finding was 'very, very intriguing and very, very suspicious'.

He said it was not definitive proof that Covid was engineered in a lab and released, but it signalled that coronaviruses was being studied in Chinese labs very early in the pandemic.

'The two things that really stand out for me are there are these three key mutations bringing the bat Covid closer to the first Wuhan strain. It is very very suspicious [and could be] a signature of the ancestral Sars-CoV-2.'

The Antarctic samples also contain DNA from Chinese hamsters and green monkeys which Professor Young said suggested the early virus may have been grown in animal cells. 

‘All of this is looking like a contamination in the sequencing process at Sangon Biotech Centre... Intriguingly, the contamination with bits of genetic information from humans, green monkeys and Chinese hamsters, those are all representative of cell lines used for viruses. 

'The green monkey cells are used to grow the virus and the Chinese hamster cell line are a very famous line used often to study viruses. It does suggest that the virus had been grown in cells. we can't assume any more than that, [without] the exact dates of when that took place.’

His comments were echoed by Professor Bloom: 'The timeline matters a lot here. If they were sequenced in Dec 2019 then it's exceptionally important, because [China] holds SarsCov2s not discovered until December 30 to 31.

'On other hand, if sequenced in early 2020 then they could be contaminated with some early patient samples and still concord with Chinese government timeline. Right now, it doesn't seem there is enough info to narrow down timeline to distinguish between these.

'All we can say is that these samples were contaminated at Sangon Biotech with some early SarsCov2 viruses, some of which appear to have been from lab-grown samples.' ...

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Joe Biden and the Feminization of the West (THE SAAD TRUTH_1283)