Favorites July 17th 2022

June 2022, San Diego

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

If you were hoping anything had changed for the better regarding America’s inflexible public health institutions, @ddiamond’s reporting suggests it has not.

washingtonpost.comDoctors treating monkeypox complain of ‘daunting’ paperwork, obstaclesSome worry the window is closing to prevent the virus from becoming permanently entrenched in the United States.

Accessing the Monkeypox treatment requires the physician to fill out 100 pages of forms, and the appointment to initiate the medication takes between 1 and 3 hours. Others were less kind than Yglesias in their takes about the situation.

Nathan Taylor @ntaylor963

James Webb Jupiter images are cool 👍 But only linking because correction was funny: "An earlier version of this article misstated the distance light had traveled from a galaxy across the universe. It was 80 billion trillion miles, not 80 trillion miles." nytimes.com/2022/07/15/sci…

Also cool: they were able to capture Saturn's ring, which people often forget.

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 @Noahpinion

Still no wave of deaths in the U.S. despite the BA.4/BA.5 wave of cases that began three months ago. Fingers crossed...

In case you're wondering, we're also not seeing anything in excess death stats.

Andrew Prokop @awprokop

Everyone in the US knows about the Cuban Missile Crisis but I’m always stunned when I read about the Taiwan Straits Crises in the ‘50s. The US was seriously prepared to use nukes in mainland China if Mao didn't back down from an attack on Taiwan. archive.org/details/The195…

Planned to move straight to nukes, "No point in planning for prolonged conventional operations since they would not succeed", yikes.

Joey Politano 🏳️‍🌈 @JosephPolitano

Saw a $10 bill on the ground and thought of that classic joke where an economist walks past the $100 bill she sees on the ground because "if it was real, someone would have already picked it up". Picked up the $10 bill to discover it was just an ad for a local ministry.

Here's the joke in full if you've never seen it, but it's pretty straightforward.

Threads

• Thread about the realignment caused by the Russia-Ukraine war, in particular, the massive screw-up of abandoning the Iran nuclear deal, leaving us allied with the Saudis instead.

• If you're interested, a thread about how John Fetterman is experimenting with a laser focused campaign against Mehmet Oz for the Senate in Pennsylvania.