All of which is to say: even without exiting the WHO, the US has over the past year greatly weakened its own domestic capacity to deal with health threats Now leaving the WHO has made an extremely bad situation immeasurably worse It's the RFK Jr/Great Barrington Declaration/anti-vax approach END/

To see how incredibly dangerous and anti-scientific the Bhattacharya/Memoli "plan" is, read this astounding piece by @angierasmussen.bsky.social and @jeremyfaust.bsky.social 5/n insidemedicine.substack.com/p/a-rebuttal...

So, here's the thing Compared to a year ago, when Trump was inaugurated & issued the executive order to begin the process of withdrawing the U.S. from the WHO, the U.S. federal public health system is now in a much worse, much weaker situation, thanks to RFK Jr and his lackeys A short 🧵 1/x

*stares at mandatory vaccination discourse* Nope. Not today, Satan. Some other day, maybe, but not today.

It's old news that most of what Trump says is a lie, but Vance is an epic and vicious and often outrageous liar, and someone should track them the way they used to track Trump's lies.

One of the bromides that the anti-vax lobby loves to recycle is "Where there is risk, there must be choice." Curiously, they ignore the risk posed to the public by their choice. Vaccinate or don't—that's up to you—but the risk management of having unvaccinated people in the population isn't.

I really don't understand the mental contortionism people are going through to find something redeeming in comments that clearly lack anything redeemable in them.

Huh. Last I checked, medical doctors were supposed to do everything possible to ensure their patients, especially particularly vulnerable members of society like children, receive the standard of care.

The solipsistic lens here is staggering. What about the child with acute myeloid leukemia who gets measles inclusion body encephalitis because they breathed the same air as someone in the pre-exanthematous phase of the disease since we lost our elimination status? Where is their autonomy?

We are unbelievably lucky that smallpox is no longer something we have to worry about

Starmer rebukes Trump over ‘frankly appalling’ remarks on Nato troops in Afghanistan www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Heh, Teen has been watching husband's DVDs of The Wire. Sometimes a box set is just what you want.

Latest post, on reading-to-revise: kucharski.substack.com/p/the-pop-qu...

In case you are wondering why I was silly enough to buy a series instead of stream. This was back when the internet wasn’t good enough to stream TV where I was.

I just bought a tv box set…on DVD. This is because I have already paid for it once on Apple TV, but now it keeps annoying me with blocks that say “subscribe to Paramount to keep watching”. No. I paid already. I don’t care if you’ve had an argument. 😡

It was also the way the elite could preserve their status in society, ensuring the perpetuation of high level, influential jobs for the sons of the wealthy.

Whatever Christianity was to begin with, by the time it became enmeshed with the Roman Empire, it was deeply worldly - concerned and involved with commerce, the administration of cities, political alliances.

Listening to Amol Rajan talking to Tom Holland on his Radical podcast - and quite surprised to hear this history of Christianity as a history of ideas - completely separate from economics and politics.

And so it wasn’t radical and revolutionary at all. It was just another example of how elites use ideology to preserve hierarchical, stratified society. Tom Holland might do well to read my book Domination. But I suspect he won’t.

(Remarkably, Tom Holland even claims Christianity made atheism possible! Ignoring centuries of pre-Christian secular and atheist thought.)

“If you are not gaining a new capability in exchange for the one you have outsourced, you may be conceding to the algorithms” writes Noel Carroll of the University of Galway theconversation.com/is-ai-hurtin...

People often talk about the "loss of trust" in institutions, but that's like a doctor telling you you're sick because you lack wellness. It says nothing of the underlying condition, just a vague definition of the symptoms.

We’ve spent years trying to fact-check our way out of this, and it failed. Democratic decay isn’t about bad information versus good information, it’s about the collapse of the systems that turn information into reality. If every bot and Russian troll vanished tomorrow, the rot would still be there.

🧵 @jburnmurdoch.ft.com is spot on about the conditions in his FT piece. Liberal democracy held it together thanks to growth, good demographics, and the promise of a better future. Those days are gone, and that’s the "why" behind the erosion. However...

I agree. Get it direct unless you’re going for something very budget

I wrote about a new study about testosterone and hip fractures being hyped on IG, but it has serious issues and honestly, I would have rejected it as a reviewer. First, it’s a study of men and women. As if the biology is the same here. It goes downhill from there. open.substack.com/pub/vajenda/...

Today I learned there's a drug for narcolepsy called Wakix (that's the brand name), and something about that is really amusing to me.

Malice and an unbounded vacuousness of character are not the same as mental illness. No one is served by using the language of the latter to communicate about the former.

Woman Throws Self On Grenade By Answering Call From Dysregulated Friend https://theonion.com/woman-throws-self-on-grenade-by-answering-call-from-dysregulated-friend/

Here’s the beginning of our film about Raeburn’s rediscovered portrait of Robert Burns. Watch the whole film at blackiehouse.org

ICE Deems Being In Privacy Of Own Home Obstruction Of Justice https://theonion.com/ice-deems-being-in-privacy-of-own-home-obstruction-of-justice/

Aurora Coolness xkcd.com/3196/

Am I missing something obvious here? It feels like there's a lot more to the mechanism here than cystatin-C, assuming that cancer and Alzheimer's generally not being comorbid is a genuine finding.

Cancer is also well known for triggering a state of low-grade chronic inflammation, including with IL-1β elevations in the periphery, which can be sensed by neural afferents to exert central effects on the CNS (and there may be some transcellular transport of peripheral IL-1β), from what I'm seeing.

Trying to understand the argument here— Sure, cystatin-C might engage TREM2, and there are multiple plausible reasons this could help in AD, though the clinical trial record so far is... eh. But if cystatin-C is so potently protective against AD, why does AD frequently co-occur with CKD?

Fact-Checking Trump On Greenland https://theonion.com/fact-checking-trump-on-greenland/

There are so many terrible things about this country and so many terrible people at work in it right now but a great queen of the silver screen and a top talk show host are preaching civil resistance, and a lot of people are living it.

We are so excited that Jane is talking about the pillars of support for a regime that organizing can topple, and singing the praises of Freedom Trainers.....

“The thing people really need to know is behind this all — is cronyism, is bad science. It's babies getting chronic illnesses that can kill them.” —@angierasmussen.bsky.social www.npr.org/2026/01/22/g...

I would disagree with the last comment on the shared post to say we've come pretty far and they're trying to shove time and history themselves backward, to hit rewind.

I know totalitarian regimes have succeeded in removing all these things. We're not there and I do not think we will be.

I wish I could remember who said they wish they had cultural power but they're trying to use political power in its place. They can remove the signs. They cannot remove all the histories, primary documents, and collective knowledge of the past, and their attacks underscore why these things matter.

Europe stood firm and united in full solidarity with Greenland & the Kingdom of Denmark. Work on Arctic security continues. We'll step up investments in Greenland and Arctic-ready equipment. And deepen security cooperation with partners in the region ↓ link.europa.eu/RtKdCV

Hurrah! Melissa Hagan's round-up of #menopause books came out recommending mine, amid the glut of celeb-meno-marketing-memoir titles. Word of mouth is key, so if you like & trust a book please recommend it on socials & to friends. Thanks to everyone who has! www.griffithreview.com/articles/men...

@ericmeyerowitz.bsky.social doing the lord's work here:

“When an individual enters their residence, conceals themselves behind a closed door, and attempts to go about their everyday life, they are willfully impeding the important work of law enforcement officers and engaging in domestic terrorism,” said DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin

My own GP said it best. “I wear a mask because I run a solo practice, so if I get sick, there is only emergency cover.”

Health anxiety and crippling fear of microbes are also real conditions. Ones that should be dealt with sensitively. As someone else said “good comedy doesn’t punch down”.

It’s called “I care about my clinically vulnerable patients. The ones that know it, and the ones that don’t” Because big dude that twisted his knee has no idea that the sitting around for the next few days he has planned is actually bad for lungs, esp if they get infected.

Dear #BBC Wearing PPE is not called health anxiety. It’s called “I’m the only one left carrying all the bleeps and covering the roster”…