The All Things Political Topic - What's Going On...?

[Malcador]

Look at what the poor IDF was forced to do.

[Zoraptor]

Kind of weird watching a news report from our state broadcaster yesterday where they didn't use 'according to the Hamas run health ministry' but did mention western media being banned from Gaza by Israel. It had been nearly two years of steadfastly refusing to acknowledge exactly why there was never any corroboration of anything from western journalists on the ground so they had to- had to- both sides everything no matter how obvious the truth was. Guess they realised there was simply no way to spin emaciated children and flattened cities as being precise and humanitarian action by the only democracy in the ME any more.

[Lexx]

They could always just not talk about it. I guess major goals were achieved and something has changed that we don't know about. /conspiracy 

[Malcador]

3 hours ago, Zoraptor said:

Guess they realised there was simply no way to spin emaciated children and flattened cities as being precise and humanitarian action by the only democracy in the ME any more.

Nah can be done. The hasbara crowd seems to give :

• The UN's fault (and they are all compromised by Hamas) for blocking the GHF somehow
• The footage is lies and that was battle damage against terror infrastructure (I still laugh at terror tunnels)
• The emaciated kids had pre-existing illnesses and the anti-semitic media is to blame.
• Hamas' fault all this happened, so.

Mostly just "la la la I can't hear you" type stuff, I concede.

Edited 23 hours ago by Malcador

[rjshae]

1 hour ago, Malcador said:

Nah can be done. The hasbara crowd seems to give :

• The UN's fault (and they are all compromised by Hamas) for blocking the GHF somehow
• The footage is lies and that was battle damage against terror infrastructure (I still laugh at terror tunnels)
• The emaciated kids had pre-existing illnesses and the anti-semitic media is to blame.
• Hamas' fault all this happened, so.

Mostly just "la la la I can't hear you" type stuff, I concede.

There's another side to this: Eygpt is not allowing in refugees from Gaza. This is despite Eygpt being a signatory to the Geneva Convention of July 28, 1951. Populating Gaza refugee camps outside the war zone would remediate much of the starvation. Where's the international pressure on Eygpt?

[uuuhhii]

egypt didn't get enough bribe from usa to handle this mess

only one actually did something useful to stop all the atrocity are yemen

another pathetic chapter of human history

[Zoraptor]

There is no international obligation to aid in ethnic cleansing though. Everyone knows that if Palestinians go anywhere outside of Palestine they'll never be allowed back and will be there permanently- we've got nearly 80 years of history demonstrating that fact. 

Doesn't matter anyway, it's an existential matter for Sisi and no matter what is offered or what his theoretical obligations might have been he cannot accept it. It's hard enough keeping the lid on sympathy for the Palestinians without being seen to obviously and actively aid the policies of Netanyahu, Ben Gvir and Smotrich against his own country's interests. He'd get Sadat'ed by someone in the military, and be extremely lucky if that was all he got since a lot of his population would happily Gaddafi him instead.

2 hours ago, Malcador said:

Mostly just "la la la I can't hear you" type stuff, I concede.

Yeah, no credible way to spin it, instead of no way at all.

Of course there's been no credible way to spin a lot of stuff that Israel has done but that hasn't stopped their rubbish being reported without pointing out that it's rubbish, until now.

[BruceVC]

7 hours ago, uuuhhii said:

egypt didn't get enough bribe from usa to handle this mess

only one actually did something useful to stop all the atrocity are yemen

another pathetic chapter of human history

Oh yes, the Houthis

There random bombing of cargo  ships in the Red Sea has made a huge difference to Israel's  imprudent military strategy since 7 October 

Maybe the Houthis should join BRICS, that will definitely  be more significant 

[Malcador]

https://apnews.com/article/kennedy-vaccines-mrna-pfizer-moderna-1fb5b9436f2957075064c18a6cbbe3c9

"He said a “universal vaccine” that mimics “natural immunity” is the administration’s focus.

“It could be effective — we believe it’s going to be effective -- against not only coronaviruses, but also flu,” he said."

Right..

 

[uuuhhii]

any guess on how long it would take for small pox to make a come back

[rjshae]

57 minutes ago, Malcador said:

https://apnews.com/article/kennedy-vaccines-mrna-pfizer-moderna-1fb5b9436f2957075064c18a6cbbe3c9

"He said a “universal vaccine” that mimics “natural immunity” is the administration’s focus.

“It could be effective — we believe it’s going to be effective -- against not only coronaviruses, but also flu,” he said."

Right..

There has been work on a universal flu vaccine for several years now, predating this administration.

NIH clinical trial of universal flu vaccine candidate begins

That doesn't mean you won't need to have regular updates to deal with mutations.

[Malcador]

Well was more the fact that he's an anti-vaccine grifter, I suppose like everyone else in the US administration.  It's such a trivial amount to keep on studying mRNA, another arrow in the quiver isn't a bad thing, especially in light of stuff like -https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/05/weather/nws-rehiring-doge-layoffs-climate or DOGE wasting $20B. 

 

 

 

 

[Zoraptor]

5 hours ago, rjshae said:

There has been work on a universal flu vaccine for several years now, predating this administration.

NIH clinical trial of universal flu vaccine candidate begins

That doesn't mean you won't need to have regular updates to deal with mutations.

That is a rather different concept to what RFK was talking about though. Well, probably, he doesn't seem to have much in the way of grasp on one or all of semantics/ reality/ science, and practicality, so who knows what he really means.

The concept of having vaccines target something fundamental in virus families to reduce the effect of mutation and target the whole family (eg orthomyxoviridae/ flu) at once is far from new, certainly. But he's talking about a 'universal' vaccine apparently as an actual universal vaccine, not just for a family. Flu virus and coronavirus are not closely related at all- at viral Kingdom level- despite both being ssRNA viruses. The corollary would be something like wanting a universal solution for piranha and lions because they both eat people; and share many other similarities that surely can be targeted, like a spine and haemoglobin?

There has been a lot of work on targeting reverse transcriptase which is the enzyme that turns viral RNA into DNA and could, very theoretically, target any RNA virus. But even that wouldn't be universal since there are DNA viruses too.

Overall, more practical than horse dewormer or injecting bleach, but not that much so.

[Malcador]

Not a shock, he's mentioned this kind of crap before. All the more dangerous that snake Miller is around him