Well yeah: I mean if someone wanted to avoid foodborne pathogens, the best step to take would be ‘don’t eat meat at all’. This is all just mean complaining that people take the Levitical code as being somehow this sage, Iron Age wisdom that actually has modern medical meaning.

Uh no: *Nothing* kills the prion that causes Kreutzfeld-Yacob disease. And there are quite a few parasites that form calciferous shells to incubate that can burrow into cow meat and survive cooking just fine.

There’s another thing to consider: The Communist party in China is real touchy about disaster management. They’re afraid—probably correctly—that anything really ‘disruptive’ like an earthquake, disease outbreak, severe weather event, etc—could lead to widespread public criticism and a loss of control (remember they…

Well, SARS was sort of overblown too: 774 people died of SARS, out of ~8,800 who caught the disease at any point.

You’re far more likely to die from eating beef than pork. 

Look at this guy, a veritable Mandy-Lore-ian.

I . . . kind of like Island of Dr. Moreau.

Hey did you know H.P. Lovecraft was very racist?

Eh. But plastic is not infinitely recyclable; each time, the molecules are broken down and the new material is a lower grade. And a lot of the plastic we produce is unreusable anyway because it’s contaminated with food matter, unrecyclable bits (i.e. vinyl labels, thermoplastic rings, etc.).

Everyone knows Mexican Coke in the glass bottles tastes better, too (there’s that real sugar instead of corn syrup for ya). Also, it comes in a reasonable human serving size (like 6 oz) rather than the OCEANIC 1- or 2-little bottles we slug down.

Eh. Maybe. Infectious disease is worth being scared of, but to get even the *most* infectious of infectious diseases, you need to be in relatively close physical proximity to the person. It doesn’t just ‘float through the air’.

Well, I mean the strange paradox is that a.) the Saudis buy a lot of our weapons and b.) they are really shit at learning how to use them. The sheer length and intractibility of the war in Yemen—where they are not able to prevail against an enemy whose weapons are mostly Toyota pickups with 50 cals mounted in the…

They seem more than sufficiently rich.

The sun goes up, the sun goes down and every 6-12 months we learn that the Saudis and Israelis are STILL spying on us.

Isn’t this a bit much for a disease that has killed 6 people? The ordinary seasonal flu kills thousands every year.

I mean it’s entirely possible that it will go on for quite a while yet. But ‘the Rules’ get longer and longer every month, the mods are are Quite Woke. Their main hobby is banning anyone not from the USA for whom this PC stuff is kind of risible (except for a group of Israelis who have succeeded in convincing them…

I am watching the Disqus-based Avocado site (AV Club After Dark, get it?) slowly implode, as online forums all eventually seem to do, in boiling acrimony over charges of bigotry, denials of bigotry, mod favoritism, abuse of mod tools, and various other things.

America isn’t very good.

Those petition-gatherers are independent contractors, paid by the number of signatures they joint. “Petitionr” I believe is the startup paying them . . .

My mom thinks I’m cool.