Thread by @gauravsabnis

People! Stop letting news of newer variants bring you down, unless they are causing a surge in hospitalizations or deaths. Viruses mutate. That's what they do. Why we have new flu shots every year. Covid is going to keep mutating, vaccine or not. Blame Darwin uncle if you must.

As long as vaccinated people are not getting hospitalized, especially mRNA vaccinated folks, freaking out about newer variants is not useful.

It's better to pressure the "global north" to step the fuck up & give free mRNA shots to everyone in the world who wants it, yesterday!

Maybe I'm being too naive but I'm shocked that there is no global progressive movement to pressure Uncle Sam and Aunty NATO to put that expensive global armada to some good use. You can't do squat in Ukraine anyway. Go vaccinate Africa! It'll cost like 15% tops of DoD budget.

America under a new president has vaccinated the country with impressive ease & speed. The portion country that likes not dying for an orange turd anyway. We're pretty much done with the vaccinations.

Why not announce a "new Marshall Plan" of vaccinating the rest of the world?

Your trillion dollar defence budget can't stop piddly trillion dollar gdp Russia. You're good only to bomb small countries and then leave them in disgrace a decade later. You could totally do that with *just* 800 billion dollars and use $200 bn to vaccinate the world.

Also there is no widespread movement wondering how the fuck we spent $2.5 trillion in Afghanistan, and the country except Kabul looks almost exactly like it did twenty years ago. The focus is more on the disgrace of leaving. No one is asking where the money went!

Even though the answer is right there in all the Pentagon budget reports, all of which are public. About 85% of that $2.5 trillion went right back to good old USA. Salaries and private contractors and weapons no one needs cos we ain't fighting Russia with them anyway.

When you think about it, that $2.5 trillion dollar war is the biggest mob scam in history plus the most efficient money laundering scheme ever! A heist in which hundreds of thousands were killed, a country destroyed, all to steal that money from taxpayers & make the rich richer

It is so ridiculous that the country has THE best natural defense in the world, in form of two pretty huge oceans and a massive chugging internal economy that bounces back from any recession faster than any other in the world, spends so much on "defense", not public transport.

Nobody has every invaded the US mainland in its current scale or form and no one ever will, unless aliens are real. The farthest anyone got was Hawaii in 1942, and 3 huge buildings in 2001. The only real threat to America is nukes but that is then a threat to the human race.

There is zero logical actual military reason, real self-defense reason, to keep having this military after the collapse of the Soviet union, other than making rich people richer. And even in the cold war, Eisenhower himself was coining the phrase "military-industrial complex".

There is absolutely no way that China or Russia or India, or even all three combined would ever dream of an actual land invasion of the United States.

And they're all capable to destroying the US with nukes anyway.

So what's the point of this global military?

Money laundering!

Do you have any idea how big mainland America is and how many guns its people have!!!??? No Soviet was batshit insane enough to even contemplate an invasion. Have you seen the oceans? Unless teleportation exists, what real threat do we have to the US, except internal ones?

The Soviets and the Chinese and the Indians and the Pakistanis and even the North Koreans realized that once you get a nuke, ain't no way US is going to actual war with you, unless Trump gets a second term. And they have nothing to gain by invading the US. Nothing.

From colonization to the revolutionary war to the civil war to this maga invasion, the only real threat to America in any form has been angry or greedy white people. White supremacists in the US have more guns than China, Russia, and India combined.

No one even talks disarmament or total denuclearization anymore. Not even the idealists. Have you noticed that? 😳😳😳

Can you imagine that Nixon would be considered a mainstream Democrat today? It'll blow your mind if you think about it in detail.

THE biggest thing that would automatically make Nixon a RINO today, is that he was steadfastly for civil rights & championed the act and was in fact more progressive on the race issue than LBJ? He got one third of the black vote in 1960 vs Kennedy. 33%! Can you imagine that?

Nixon also started the EPA, passed the clean air and water acts, and essentially made America the largely fresh air clean water country it is today. Until the 70s, US was insanely polluted! It's not pristine today but definitely better than China or India.

I live in THE most populated AND densely packed city in the country with lots of cars & buses. With huge refineries next door. Used to have smoggy air and stinky rivers until 50 years ago. Like India or China today.

Nixon changed that! Nixon! I'd forgive him a little B&E in 2022

Sure, NYC or northeast air and water isn't quite Colorado or Utah level clean but I was an almost daily runner for about 3 years on either side of moving from Bombay to NYC. I was shocked at how non-suffocating NYC air was, given that it emits way more smoke and effluents!

Oh wow, TIL.

Again, this is not an attempt to whitewash Nixon. Nothing can make up for extending the war in Vietnam, bombing Cambodia, and of course, actual felony.

It shows how far the Overton window has shifted that even Nixon would be a RINO today!

https://twitter.com/bongopondit/status/1506044415181172738?t=Xmuuw7sVp7s0aG2fpUTVdw&s=19