I can't seem to find any info about these guys anywhere. Where are they from?

Most people don't seem to know that the J&J covid vax used a viral envelope that much of the population has some immunogenicity against. Nor do they know that the J&J vax was limited to one dose, not because of its superior effectiveness, but because the first dose would raise their immunogenicity such that the second dose would be ineffective and a greater risk of adverse reaction. Also, they can no longer benefit from vaccines or gene therapies that use such an envelope.

I did not know any of that. Thank you for sharing.

Yeah, fair enough. I recall infighting among Democrats in the campaign period about whether or not they should be concentrating on Project 2025 or talking about jobs and price hikes. That said, the examples he's citing (the West Wing reunion being just one of them) seems to be more about where they're at now - and more particularly where they are aiming, which is towards a restoration of the previous order - rather than redefining themselves for the new order.

Tooze a dipshit? C'mon man. Wages of Destruction was a pretty landmark read.

I took Tooze's basic point to be that Trumpism is rewriting the American and global order in ways that are profound and likely awful for most of us and that the Democrat machine - stuck in conceptual paradigms and narratives we've taken for granted (and useful) for decades - is failing to grasp the enormity of this, and consequently they are using the old paradigms and narratives to try to put out the fire even while the house is burning down around them.

Yeah, he's a private little guy. He likes the two of us, tolerates one or two others, and will literally hide for hours to avoid being seen by anyone else who visits our apartment. He does not like feeling exposed.

Also, this little fellow is not a fan of being forced out of the house to sit in his carrier in the local park twice a week.

House update. Settlement date is mid-May. We'll be on a bridging loan - on top of the mortgage - while we sell our apartment to help purchase the house. I don't know what it's like elsewhere (are they even called bridging loans elsewhere?) but the rates on bridging loans in Australia are high - as in 8-9%. So we want to sell our apartment asap to minimise the amount of time we're on the bridging loan. This means having the apartment open for inspection by potential buyers twice a week until it goes to auction at the end of March. This means having the apartment spotlessly clean and devoid of personal ephemera twice a week, which is itself a labour of hours every time. My wife's boss is ludicrously demanding at the moment (a whole other story I won't get into right now) which means it's me on me to take care of this while also managing a major increase in my own workload. Upshot of it is, there's not a lot of spare time at the moment.

I feel like the actual death toll from the virus - terrible though it was - may prove less destructive than the information virus that emerged along with it. That hasn't gone away, and we're still waiting on a sufficient proportion of the population to be inoculated against it.