No Excuses

Now that we have a QAnon Senate candidate, it’s time to bump the best post in this thread. Broke: Conspiracy theorists taking over a major political party is bad for democracy Bespoke: The real danger to democracy is actually horny, dumb teenagers on college campuses

Prime gulag candidate right here.

Some good news: This would be the first mRNA based vaccine if it gets approval. Would be a big breakthrough in vaccine development and a great new addition to our infectious disease toolkit: https://horizon-magazine.eu/article/five-things-you-need-know-about-mrna-vaccines.html

I know in a “civil war” scenario I won’t stand a chance, nor will I participate. I’m with Sin. If the country collapses, or is on the verge of it, I’m driving my ass up to the Canadian border or buying a one way plane ticket to Europe. I am more worried about just general crime going up in communities.

I'm open to any suggestion. Not interested in rifles but a handgun for myself and my wife is what I'm thinking.

This country is in deep trouble. We've reached the bread lines but once we reach the "I just lost my house" phase, all bets are off. I have legitimately never thought about owning a gun until now.

That’s what clinical trials are for my dude. You won’t be the guinea pig.

If we don’t vaccinate a large enough % of people to reach herd immunity, the virus will continue to spread in communities, and over time will likely mutate and render existing vaccines pointless. From a public health perspective, you need enough of the population to get vaccinated so that immunocompromised people who can’t receive vaccines are protected. These are your old and sick people suffering from cancer, etc. Not getting the vaccine as a healthy person will be a purely selfish act borne out of ignorance.

There’s a legislative solution to putting a stop to a lot of this nonsense and I like that Biden has signaled his support for it. Repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/17/21070403/joe-biden-president-election-section-230-communications-decency-act-revoke Nothing will get social media platforms to self-regulate faster than a flood of lawsuits. I used to be against this measure but with the exception of Twitter, every other platform has failed to address the spread of misinformation and fake news.

It’s not the politicians: it’s the people who put them there. We have collectively treated treated ignorant opinions and stupidity entirely way too kindly for about 30-40 years. The digital age and online communities just accelerated the widespread acceptance of stupidity. And stupid people will find kinship with other stupid people and put them in positions of power, which is almost the entire ecosystem for the Republican Party now. Under the guise of “free speech”, completely asinine and false garbage spread uncontrollably. There is nothing that compels social media platforms or online message boards to allow abjectly false information to be shared or spread in their ranks. We’re now starting to see that say, anti-vaccination fringe views are gaining in massive numbers because Facebook refuses to moderate content. and what is the downstream consequence of this?

Im not sure if we get that big spike for a second wave. There’s a huge difference in how messaging and news travels today and people are unlikely to resume normal activity even if the first wave wanes. I think we are going to see a very prolonged first wave that never really goes down but maybe doesn’t see huge upticks either. People won’t have the confidence to go to restaurants etc, offices won’t resume normal activity and meetings/coworking will happen over computers. We’ll see spikes in cases in the usual places: meat packing plants, prisons, nursing homes, etc where social distancing is impossible. This country is basically lining up to sacrifice old people in nursing homes, prisoners and anyone who works in an essential, densely packed environment.

We can get a gauge on fatalities based on excess mortality data. We do pretty good record keeping on deaths. The spread of infection based on serological surveys seems to be 10-20x officially counted cases. So if the US has 1.2 million recorded cases right now, we probably have really had between 10-20 million infected already.

Every single country here is led by authoritarian conservative leaders. Stupid people do stupid things and then blame others.

This is nothing more than a complete and total failure of the Trump admin at this point. The time they needed to erect public health infrastructure and put contact tracing into place is gone and the economy is in shambles. The economy will continue to be in shambles because people will not have the confidence to return to normal behavior since the virus outbreak wasn’t contained. Developing nation states are managing this better than us.

This is thanks to the Fed which basically bailed out corporations that didn't want to keep employees on payroll. This is all temporary and eventually the lack of productivity and output will catch up, but it was without a doubt a completely gross transfer of wealth. If anyone wants to understand why the stock market is going up, this is why: https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-nw-coronavirus-boeing-fed-bailout-20200504-2has6gghmnfsnj5mvjjpaa6xye-story.html

Seeming more and more likely that Tara Reade is full of crap. The narrative change over the past year seems to show that she didn't get the reaction she hoped for, and then escalated the accusation to get more attention. And then lied about "media censorship", when people from multiple outlets were listening to her for over a year and trying to corroborate her claims.

Poverty isn’t good for mental or physical health.

It turns out that dead or sick people can’t work. Now Americans might be forced to eat more vegetables. The horror!

High level idiocracy.

Claims on higher contagiousness are difficult to make based purely on computational modeling work. I read through the link China posted and it seems like there isn't much in vitro or in vivo support. Unless you show the "why", this is merely speculation IMO. It could be that this strain is more contagious than what initially started in Wuhan. It is far more likelier that we don't actually know how contagious the initial strain was because China gaslighted the world until mid-to-late January and their data has mostly been sugar coated garbage.

Love how he devoted a measly 30 seconds to get a favorable news clip in. "Hey I'm only saying this so I can point to my disapproval of something I took a significant role in creating". In the morning, Fox and Friends was cheering on the "open the economy" goons and running segments encouraging people to pressure officials. All of these people are aware that "reopening the economy" is not going to do jack ****, and will in fact, make things worse. They are smart enough to know that economy only "reopens" when the virus is contained and vast majority of the public is reassured into resuming normal activities. The only logical conclusion is that they intentionally want to make things worse and they are intentionally riling up their base of angry, gun toting goons because they know they've lost on every other metric of re-election: the economy is in shambles and people are sick, afraid and losing family members/friends to a completely preventable tragedy. They've chosen chaos because their is no fixing the initial bungled response and the downstream poverty, fear and death it has brought upon people. Expect a lot more divisive rhetoric to further enrage gun toting maniacs because this is all they have left. It's going to get a lot worse until November 3, 2020. Probably even afterwards.

Gretchen Whitmer is approaching Hillary levels of obsession in the right wing. Their is no parallel for the disdain right wingers have against smart, competent women. Sarah Palin is the highest level of female intellect that is acceptable.

A first for this admin. Might be a sign that their indeed is a bottom and they’ve reached it.

BlUe LivEs MatTer Amazing how much restraint the police have when a bunch of right wing goons show up. If this were black people or college students, pepper spray and batons would be out in full force.

I swear, MD drivers are a special brand of crazy. MoCo is speed trap central and people just DGAF. They’re handing out as many speeding tickets as they do in regular traffic conditions despite fewer cars on the road.