Walden Ponderer

One of the fundamental realities that anecdotal stories are missing is that from the very beginning, most Covid positive patients will experience mild symptoms. The minority, however, is well above the threshold of statistical significance. Omicron is fixing to fuck shit up. Milder? Well, maybe. But so virulent that "milder" don't matter a single fuck. For the next month and a half, the grim reaper is going to be working overtime.

The corpse of Jeffrey Dahmer could be sent into almost any situation and do a better job than MTG.

I am hard pressed to remember a single Democrat in the modern era who has ever had anything kind to say about trickle-down bullshit. If you want to warp reality enough, you could say Phil Gramm, I suppose.

Well, that really brings it home. "What kind of risk are you prepared to deal with." This is actually reason #1 on the list of reasons we left Texas. Like hell am I going to keep my family somewhere that the government is totally unprepared for unpredictable climate events -- not 50 years from now, but now. When we were selecting where to live, I started by looking at the IPCC charts on projected changes to rainfall patterns, then looked at possible sea level changes, and then looked at earthquake data. That last one is big -- most folk think of earthquakes as a West Coast risk, but that has never actually been true; they have been less newsworthy elsewhere, but for most of the continent, it's when, not if. The fact remains, though, that even as carefully as I picked the Carolina Piedmont, there are readily identifiable risks like hurricanes, or freak winter storms, but also unpredictable risks: what happens if our wetter-than-most weather pattern breaks, even for just a year or two? We have less fire risk than the mountains right now, but there's no guarantee that pattern will hold. Bottom line is, there are a lot of people in this country who foolishly feel safe, who are about to discover to their sorrow that there is no such thing.

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Every time I read this thread, I come away with the same thought: "Goddamn, Texas is fucked."

Welcome to the club. Hope it stays mild for you.

If it wasn't climate change or a pandemic, it could have been virtually anything else. There is a very real possibility, not likely, but greater than 0%, that a big enough solar storm will fry our electric grids on a global scale, knocking out internet, phones, lights, heat/AC, gas pumps, and God knows what all else. We're not prepared for that kind of calamity, any more than we are prepared for climate change, nuclear accidents, earth-killer asteroids, or another Kardashian TV show. And it's all because conservatives deny anything is wrong, and liberals dither and quibble and come up with stupid slogans instead of actually solving problems.

Is this the thread where we criticize Kamala Harris?

Subtle political satire presupposes a political environment in which the existential threat is not immediately obvious. We are not living in such a time. That's kind of the point behind the different initial responses of the professor and the student. Leo's attempts to gently guide his audience reflect his failure to readily grasp how intentionally stupid 21st century Americans are. JLaw's character grew up knowing this already. If we have any hope at all as a species, it ain't gonna be anybody over 30 who leads the way. Even Liberals like me are too conservative.

RIP.

This thread is going to have a hell of a lot of fresh subjects over the next two months. God damn antivaxxers and mask scofflaws, each and every fucking one of them.

Was just reading an article on permafrost melt, and the difficulty in calculating how much methane will get released, and I got a creepy feeling at the back of my neck, the same one I got during the middle of the day on election day in 2016, when everyone was so sure Donald Trump could never win. I strongly suspect there are numerous feedback loops in climate change that have not yet been discovered, and that while the math is good for projections based on available data, the worst case scenarios are too conservative by an order of magnitude. On the other hand, maybe my pessimism is fueled by nothing more than the last decade of Texas football.

It's a cloak room thing. I won't go into details, because this isn't the place for it, but I find it amusing as hell.