SpankyMcFarland

OK, I’ll keep my mongering to myself in future.

For sure, especially with easier-to-transplant organs like kidney. I believe a pig kidney has already survived in a monkey for two years. https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/pig-organs-1.6993364 One alternative to an animal donor, creating a kidney from the recipient’s own stem cells, seems like a long way from becoming a reality at the moment. There are certainly many thousands of patients whose lives would be prolonged and immeasurably improved if this form of animal-to-human transplantation works out. With the current epidemic of obesity in the young we are facing a massive increase in diabetic kidney failure. What a coup for South Africa that first transplant was!

There has been an expression of concern issued about the article in question: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20420986241239903

Incredibly, the medical team is talking about discharging the patient ‘soon’, a very different situation from the cardiac recipients above. The pig breed used in the Maryland heart cases was a fairly standard size bigger than humans which had to be genetically modified to make it smaller whereas the kidney came from a ‘mini pig’. However, there is a particular potential risk with this type of pig:

Things change. In 1917 there was no Hamas and Palestine was just an obscure backwater of the Ottoman Empire with a Jewish minority. Then the invading British had the bright idea to send the Eastern European Jews they and the rest of Europe didn’t want to another continent. These days, I hear a lot about the problems immigration can bring. Well that’s what happened. The Arabs revolted and the British put the revolts down brutally which greatly strengthened the position of Zionists in the territory. It takes a while to accept one has lost one’s land. Remember Churchill’s speech about fighting the Germans on the beaches and landing grounds and so on until ‘we shall never surrender’? Turns out most people on the planet think that way. There were always people looking for a solution on both sides but they had opponents on their side too. Barak and Olmert had to deal with Likud and we know what happened to Rabin. On the other side, things were naturally even more chaotic partly because Palestine isn’t a state and also because exiles can become marinated in the most extreme positions and were poisoned by Islamicist ideology. Abbas was once reasonable. The offer from Olmert was a good place to start but neither side had enough time to press it home before Bibi was facing off against Obama and the moment was lost. If you look at any tribal conflict that has been peacefully resolved you will usually see a long catalogue of failure before the deal. Peace in Ireland took 800 years. Obviously, the clock has been put way back now with the atrocities committed by Hamas but it is still ticking. Humans can change. Peace is possible. BTW I also believe that one day a mini-Iran will be something for any developing country to aspire to. I remember when it was a great place to visit - my school used to organize trips there. That can happen again.

The rhetorical question in the title of this thread represents a classic example of projection. Republicans know the claim that their party has become a cult around one odious man, Trump, and many have left because they feel it has. So what to do: claim the other party is doing what you are doing.

It’s on life support at this stage. https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4544660-newsmax-host-jim-jordan-biden-impeachment/

So Trump just happened to change his mind after talking to this guy with a big stake in TikTok, making his political followers in the Republican Party look silly?

On March 16, Rick Slayman, a 62 year old man with terminal kidney failure and multiple other serious medical problems, received a pig kidney. The pig donor was genetically altered in a similar way to the pigs used in the two Maryland heart transplants above but was a different type of pig. Recently, a pig kidney transplanted into a brain-dead human patient survived for a month. So far, Mr. Slayman is doing well. https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/21/health/pig-kidney-transplant-living-person/index.html https://www.massgeneral.org/news/press-release/worlds-first-genetically-edited-pig-kidney-transplant-into-living-recipient

Obviously, the war matters more to Putin than it does to us in the West and in North America especially. We are a long way from the current front line. 40% of Russian spending is now on the military. We certainly have the capacity to prevail but do we have the stamina to wait Putin out? He’s banking on us giving up or a Trump presidency.

I have no idea how much money Joe Biden and his spouse or Hunter Biden have invested or made in a China. I do know the matter is hotly contested. Notice in my post that I said that Tesla and Apple have bigger ties there. Actually, much bigger. This is not a partisan issue nor is it confined to politicians. Any large investment in China, by a company or an individual, is a potential vulnerability for Western governments.

If illegal immigration is such a problem, why block Lankford’s bill? https://apnews.com/article/congress-border-deal-rejected-lankford-immigration-045fdf42d42b26270ee1f5f73e8bc1b0

Trump’s wobble on TikTok illustrates a wider vulnerability. His friend Jeff Yass has a large stake in the company and may thus be vulnerable to manipulation by the PRC. Even more serious are the investments that Tesla and Apple have made in that country. Can they be trusted to advocate for America’s interests instead of their own bottom line?

This is the point I’m making: if you want to send them home, fine, but show that you are aware of the consequences of doing that and the speed of doing that. If it was done abruptly it would cause a tremendous shock to the economy. I don’t see how a big spike in inflation could be avoided, for example. Doing it all at once is not a reasonable policy to suggest. On the Republican side, there’s a clear schism between voters and big donors on this issue that is not always acknowledged. Many businesses knowingly employ large numbers of illegal workers year after year and yet the businessmen who do this rarely face the threat of jail. If it’s such a problem why aren’t more employers facing real consequences? Like this guy, for example, and he’s by no means the worst: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/08/trump-organization-undocumented-workers

Internees in neutral Ireland, also called ‘guests of the nation’ and usually airmen or sailors stranded there, had a much better time. I think the Germans were better off. The British were quietly repatriated to fight another day but the Germans had a cushy war: I don’t think any of them tried to escape. As noted above they had to promise not to! https://www.historyireland.com/german-internees-curragh-camp/#:~:text=By the end of the,Biscay on 27 December 1943.

And who would do their jobs? And for how much more? Do you know how much work they do in the economy? And they work darn hard too. If this was possible to do tomorrow it would cause a godawful shock to the system - the farms, nursing homes and hotels of the nation.

I see a British mortician, appropriately named John O’Looney, is promoting the claim that the Covid vaccine cause blood clots. https://www.factcheck.org/2022/12/scicheck-died-suddenly-pushes-bogus-depopulation-theory/

A lot of people talk like this when they are in Opposition, shocked, shocked, I tell you, by the level of corruption, undefended borders, parlous finances etc.etc. that’s going on. He will have to win multiple elections and get serious stuff done before he deserves comparison with the likes of Chrétien or Mulroney.

So can one of you Trumpsters explain what is going on here? https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13199503/Trump-TikTok-Billionaire-Jeff-Yass-Treasury-Secretary.html

She wasn’t sitting at home doing a crossword when she was shot. This is getting foolishly pedantic. The Jan 6 rioters were trespassing but many of them were doing much more serious things than that.

There was no riot? All that coverage was as fake as the moon landing?

Here’s some validation for those who have suffered long Covid symptoms, especially brain fog. Their condition is associated with measurable brain dysfunction, an elevation in blood levels of S-100, a protein common in the brain, and other evidence of blood-brain barrier abnormalities. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-024-01576-9#:~:text=Our results suggest that long,the TLs and frontal cortex. Loss of smell does not seem to be part of long Covid syndrome and may have an inflammatory basis.

No, it’s Ukraine’s choice to be free and fight on for now. If they want a deal then we are in a different situation. Remember that we are more than a century from this kind of imperial thinking across Europe where everything was determined by a handful of well-dressed megalomaniacs. Disputes between states in Western Europe aren’t sorted out by wars any more.

And what credibility would such a deal have? Putin would sign a deal, then press on, perhaps at first with cyber warfare and terrorism. He’s not going to stop if he thinks he can steal more.

Many people who voted for Brexit now regret what they did. Such feelings even have a rather ugly name: https://www.statista.com/statistics/987347/brexit-opinion-poll/ And immigration remains a problem. https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/25/uk/uk-net-migration-figures-gbr-intl/index.html Britain still has to negotiate trade deals but as one medium-sized country that’s turning out to be far more difficult than predicted by Brexiteers all those years ago. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-uk-trade-cheese-1.7094817 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/dec/18/joe-biden-signals-he-has-no-interest-in-signing-us-uk-trade-agreement It is said that no man is an island. Well, it turns out that no island is an island either. Any country that desires a standard of living ahead of North Korea’s needs good relationships with other countries. Absolute sovereignty does not exist. Leaving a bloc which contained so many major trading partners was a rash decision opposed in two of the UK’s non-sovereign ‘countries’, more like provinces, Scotland and Northern Ireland, as well as London whose wealth sustains the whole shebang. Such internal divisions make the future of the UK itself less certain. As Andrew Coyne noted recently, many european countries have surpassed Canada’s GDP per capita. They certainly don’t have to depend on intergenerational wealth to live like us. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-canada-is-no-longer-one-of-the-richest-nations-on-earth-country-after/ And as for social mobility by country… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index