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Formerly DT: COVID-19 - Featuring Lots of Politics, now CR because political talk not going away

InkaUtexas

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Biff Tannen

Biff Tannen 45674

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34 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

This.  The fact that this was posted as some sort of implied criticism reveals so fucking much about the fucking toxic cocktail of idiocy and insanity the poster is serving up.

I cannot in good conscience, even knowing GRHorn's posting history, fathom that this was meant as a criticism.  There is no way to interpret it that way.  Unless he just wants Biden to make stuff up before an investigation and report has been made, which is I guess what dotard would do.

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Uncle Boobs
Uncle Boobs

Against my better judgment and several beers deep, I have taken you up on this, potentially ending my streak of totally worthless posts. I have done 3 and 7 day averages only on the Worldometer data. 

Brisketexan
Brisketexan

Daughter’s home. A little PTSD, we’re picking up Whataburger to help.

Coelenterate Fuccboi
Coelenterate Fuccboi

Just try and imagine GreenspointTexas being the person to intubate you as you fight for your life against COVID-19. You’re laying there gasping for air while he chastises you for all the things you li

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DigglerontheHoof

DigglerontheHoof 21186

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2 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

I cannot in good conscience, even knowing GRHorn's posting history, fathom that this was meant as a criticism.  There is no way to interpret it that way.  Unless he just wants Biden to make stuff up before an investigation and report has been made, which is I guess what dotard would do.

Always remember, in addition to being a moronic troll, GR is a coward, a cunt and a traitor. 

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Beau Vine

Beau Vine 54211

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A Tennessee woman was arrested this week after authorities say she drove her SUV through a COVID-19 vaccination tent, nearly hitting several people while yelling "no vaccine."

Virginia Christine Lewis Brown, 36, of Greenback, has been charged with seven felony counts of reckless endangerment. She was released on bonds totalling $21,000 and has an initial court appearance set for June 7, according to the Blount County Sheriff's Office. It was unclear whether she had obtained an attorney who could speak on her behalf.

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The incident in question occurred Monday morning at a COVID-19 vaccination tent set up in the parking lot of the Foothills Mall in Maryville, a suburb of Knoxville. According to an incident report, two deputies from the Blount County Sheriff's Office said they were at the location when they saw a blue Chrysler SUV speed through a cone course, past the check-in area and then through the tent, where several health workers and National Guard personnel were preparing to administer COVID-19 vaccines. The vehicle did not stop and was traveling at a "high rate of speed," deputies wrote in the incident report.

"I have worked at this location multiple times over the past few months and the area is clearly marked with signs and cones to advise the public of the event," one deputy wrote. "The driving behavior of Ms. Brown, as she approached the tent and exited the tent towards the waiting area, caught my attention due to how quickly the vehicle was traveling through the area."

PHOTO: Virginia Christine Lewis Brown, of Greenback, Tenn., is pictured in this booking photo on May 24, 2021.
Blount County Sheriff's Office
Blount County Sheriff's Office
PHOTO: Virginia Christine Lewis Brown, of Greenback, Tenn., is pictured in this booking photo on...Read More
The workers inside the tent ran over to the deputies, telling them what had just happened. They said they heard the driver shout "no vaccine" as she plowed through the tent and that she narrowly missed seven of the workers. Several workers told the deputies that they thought the driver was going to kill them, according to the incident report.

MORE: This is why vaccine lottery prizes may work for some, according to psychology experts
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One of the deputies went after the vehicle and pulled it over. Brown allegedly told the deputy that she was driving through the tent to protest the vaccine and that she was only going 5 miles per hour. The deputy took Brown into custody without incident and transported her to the Blount County Jail, according to the incident report.

"While traveling to the jail, Ms. Brown made several statements about wanting to protest the vaccine," the deputy wrote in the incident report. "Ms. Brown stated she was driving through the course and once she got to the tent she told the personnel working she was not there for the vaccine."

mugshot-ht-ml-210527_1622124088829_hpMai

 

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Guest Lobo

Guest Lobo

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Also, the uneven-ness of her eyeglasses so that her lone tear had just made it past the boundary of the frames and captured by the shutter was the piece de resistance. 

I mean, you don't expect the booking photographer to have that kinda skill...but there she is.  

The article keeps mentioning "Chrysler SUV", but I didn't think Chrysler made an SUV.  I thought it was sedans and minivans.  

Don't matter anyway, she'll be handpicked to run against a moderate Republican in a primary in 2022.  Her legal troubles are over.

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cactusflinthead

cactusflinthead 27598

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On 1/25/2020 at 4:25 PM, Helobious said:

The regular flu kills people of all ages too. Like I’ve already said, this virus is getting way too much attention to become a worldwide pandemic. Fears are too high already and too many precautions are already being taken. The next global plague will be something that comes out of nowhere & blindsides the world. Anything short of that won’t reach pandemic levels. It’s not 1919 anymore.

 

On 1/25/2020 at 4:30 PM, Parliament said:

Tagged.  Let is revisit in 18 months.  (I agree with you, but still.)

Not quite 18 months but are you ready to revisit this?

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fattyflattie

fattyflattie 4639

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13 hours ago, WBT said:

I don't even get it.  Who are those for?  Anti-vaxers that feel like they're being persecuted?

I was not able to put that together. Look, it’s been a long night.  But I figured there weren’t that many Jews out there that were that proud of being unvaccinated.  

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Guest Lobo

Guest Lobo

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10 minutes ago, fattyflattie said:

I was not able to put that together. Look, it’s been a long night.  But I figured there weren’t that many Jews out there that were that proud of being unvaccinated.  

You must not know many Orthodox then?  My friend Lomez won't get it because of that.

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Captainant

Captainant 27655

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Former health department employee, Rebekah Jones, granted official whistleblower status

Rebekah Jones is officially a whistleblower under Florida law, the Office of the Inspector General told her attorneys Friday.

Jones, who was responsible for building the COVID-19 data dashboard for the Florida Department of Health, was fired last year after raising concerns about “misleading data” being presented to the public, according to the complaint, which was reviewed by the Miami Herald.

In the complaint, filed July 17, 2020, Jones alleged she was fired for “opposition and resistance to instructions to falsify data in a government website.” She described being asked to bend data analysis to fit pre-determined policy and delete data from public view after questions from the press — actions she claimed “represent an immediate injury to the public health, safety, and welfare, including the possibility of death to members of the public.”

On Friday, the Office of the Inspector General informed Jones that “the information disclosed does meet the criteria for whistleblower status as described by ... Florida statutes,” according to the email obtained by the Herald.

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jimmyjazz

jimmyjazz 45899

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1 hour ago, fattyflattie said:

I was not able to put that together. Look, it’s been a long night.  But I figured there weren’t that many Jews out there that were that proud of being unvaccinated.  

I think it was inspired by Marjorie's assertion that a grocery store having vaccinated employees wear badges is the equivalent of Nazis making Jews wear a yellow star.

But, Marjorie being dumb as a stump, they probably both heard it on some Q-ish radio program or some such.

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Mrs Whiggins

Mrs Whiggins 13050

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Just now, jimmyjazz said:

I think it was inspired by Marjorie's assertion that a grocery store having vaccinated employees wear badges is the equivalent of Nazis making Jews wear a yellow star.

But, Marjorie being dumb as a stump, they probably both heard it on some Q-ish radio program or some such.

I think there was another group of anti-vaxxers that did this while protesting a few weeks ago. Given that they all travel/social media in small circles it's most likely they saw it and ran with it.

Yes, back in April:

 

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Beau Vine

Beau Vine 54211

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A southern Manitoba hospital physician says staff are exhausted by a recent crush of admissions, but they're also up against something else that's draining energy and morale.

Staff at Boundary Trails Health Centre are routinely hearing from sick and unvaccinated patients who believe the pandemic is a hoax — some remaining defiant even on the brink of death.

"We hear this almost every day, and I know that's startling," said Dr. Ganesan Abbu. "It's difficult ... to know that almost 100 per cent of our admissions have not been vaccinated."

Abbu is an anesthetist and special care unit doctor at Boundary Trails, located over 100 kilometres southwest of Winnipeg and between Morden and Winkler.

The district surrounding the two small cities has the lowest vaccination rate in the province, according to provincial data.

More and more patients have flowed in during the past two weeks amid Manitoba's third wave. Abbu says he and many coworkers are waking up before dawn to start work lately just to keep up.

The hospital has converted two of its medicine and surgery units into COVID-19 areas, he said. The hospital also experienced an oxygen shortage over the weekend based on the increasing number of COVID-19 patients being put on ventilators.

Southern Manitoba hospital forced to order more oxygen to keep up with COVID-19 patients
Low vaccination rates in some Manitoba communities worry health officials
Boundary Trails nurses and the lone respiratory therapist in the hospital have shouldered the heaviest workload burden, said Abbu.

Staff are also being confronted with something beyond the painstaking hours caring for more people than usual.

"I think nurses have found it difficult to handle a community, certain segments of the community, who believe that this is a hoax, that the virus doesn't exist, and other untruths, like the vaccine is going to put a chip into each one of us who's been vaccinated and people will be able to track us," he said. 

"It flies in the face of the efforts of nurses and health-care staff who are really extending themselves to help the community in need."

Some staff are having to deal with family members who are frustrated they can't see their loved ones in hospital or believe they died of something other than COVID-19.

It's not uncommon for people to flout rules and enter the hospital without a mask on either, he said.


Dr. Ganesan Abbu is an anesthetist and the director of the special care unit, which functions similar to an ICU, at Boundary Trails Health Centre in Winkler, Man. (Submitted by Dr. Ganesan Abbu)
"They say, you know, it's a hoax," he said. "We hear this all the time."

Abbu has personally experienced patients who, even nearing death, remained in denial and continued to assert untruths about the pandemic.

"I've had two patients who have died and even right until the time that they died, they didn't believe that they had it," Abbu said. 

"It's not as though we are trying to get the patient to acknowledge that they have COVID before they die. These patients are so much in denial, they are volunteering this information."

Though Abbu says it's only a "vociferous minority" of people in the Southern Health Region who don't take COVID-19 seriously, what Boundary Trails staff are seeing in the hospital is part of a larger issue.

Southern Health has the lowest vaccine uptake rates by region in Manitoba. Just over 40 per cent of people there have received at least one dose, which is about 15 to 20 per cent lower than any of the other four regions. 

Manitoba health officials have had to team up with local religious and community leaders recently to try to spur vaccine uptake. Though the needle appears to be moving in the right direction in some communities, progress is slow.

Mistrust, religion, fear of side-effects feed COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in Winkler and Morden, residents say
Officials team up with southern Manitoba Mennonite leaders to combat vaccine hesitancy
As of Friday, about 12 per cent of the Stanley health district, which surrounds Winkler and Morden, had received a dose — a figure twice what it was a month ago.

Rates in Winkler health district increased from just shy of 14 per cent late last month to almost 24 per cent. Vaccination rates were 49 per cent in the Morden health district specifically on Friday, compared to 36 per cent in neighbouring Altona health district, and about 37 per cent in Hanover and Steinbach districts.

Provincial officials and religious leaders in the south have explained that vaccine hesitancy is linked to distrust of government with roots that stretch back decades or longer. That includes religious groups who have experienced historic harms at the hand of governments abroad before immigrating to Canada, including Mennonite communities.

Avoid shaming, build trust to combat vaccine hesitancy, southern Manitoban pastor says
Peace hero — the story of a Mennonite pacifist who was jailed because he refused to kill
Abbu said if he encounters a patient in the clinic who is relatively well who brings up false notions of the pandemic, he may talk to them about the evidence to the contrary.

He takes a different tack when dealing with gravely ill patients, especially when they're laid up in a hospital bed teetering on the brink.

"I try never to challenge a patient, not in that situation," he said.

"You need to earn their trust. They have to believe that you're going to do everything possible to help them survive this, and that is what I want."

 

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Guest Lobo

Guest Lobo

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Of all the times I’ve been to Canada I was not aware until now that southern Manitoba is basically Canada‘s East Texas

 

 

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fattyflattie

fattyflattie 4639

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1 hour ago, jimmyjazz said:

I think it was inspired by Marjorie's assertion that a grocery store having vaccinated employees wear badges is the equivalent of Nazis making Jews wear a yellow star.

But, Marjorie being dumb as a stump, they probably both heard it on some Q-ish radio program or some such.

Probably explains it.  While I thought Trump was a dipshit, and had bad ideas, I could at least read and try to figure out what he was thinking.  I can’t even begin to with Q folks. No, better to phrase it this way; I will not attempt to understand their bullshit and they get none of my time. 

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Sawbonz

Sawbonz 27547

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4 hours ago, Captainant said:

Former health department employee, Rebekah Jones, granted official whistleblower status

Rebekah Jones is officially a whistleblower under Florida law, the Office of the Inspector General told her attorneys Friday.

Jones, who was responsible for building the COVID-19 data dashboard for the Florida Department of Health, was fired last year after raising concerns about “misleading data” being presented to the public, according to the complaint, which was reviewed by the Miami Herald.

In the complaint, filed July 17, 2020, Jones alleged she was fired for “opposition and resistance to instructions to falsify data in a government website.” She described being asked to bend data analysis to fit pre-determined policy and delete data from public view after questions from the press — actions she claimed “represent an immediate injury to the public health, safety, and welfare, including the possibility of death to members of the public.”

On Friday, the Office of the Inspector General informed Jones that “the information disclosed does meet the criteria for whistleblower status as described by ... Florida statutes,” according to the email obtained by the Herald.

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GRHorn

GRHorn 105

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Spoiler

On Long Bets, a website where prognosticators test their mettle by playing for real (or at least proceeds-donated-to-charity) stakes, there is an open bet between the British astrophysicist Martin Rees, a noted worrier over apocalyptic possibilities, and Harvard University’s Steven Pinker, famous for his vaulting optimism. For Rees to win, the following prediction must be vindicated: “A bioterror or bioerror will lead to one million casualties in a single event within a six-month period starting no later than Dec 31 2020.”

 

The bet was made for the 2017-20 period; you will notice that its time frame has expired. And yet it remains unsettled, pending a resolution of the question that the Western media has finally decided to take seriously: Did Covid-19 somehow escape accidentally from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than leaping from bats or pangolins to its human Patient Zero?

So if you’re wondering how much the so-called lab leak hypothesis really matters, and what’s actually at stake, there’s one answer: The $400 that Rees bet against Pinker on the self-destructive capacities of the human race.

There are other answers, too, before we get back to what the wager represents. In the last week, as the Biden administration has ramped up its Covid origins investigation, the sharpest commentary on the lab leak theory has taken the form of media criticism from contrarian liberals like Matthew Yglesiasand Jonathan Chait. They have tried to explain how a theory that was always circumstantially plausible — given that the outbreak started more than a thousand miles from the bat habitat where similar viruses have been discovered, but just a stone’s throw from an important laboratory studying coronaviruses — was treated as pure conspiracizing by mainstream news outlets and Facebook content-warning providers for so long.

The Chait-Yglesias argument is that this was a case study in media groupthink, and especially the way that putatively neutral institutions increasingly cover controversial questions, as Chait puts it, “based entirely on how they believe political actors will use the answer.” In this case, because the lab leak theory was associated early on with Republican China hawks like Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, given prominence by conservative publications (Jim Geraghty of National Review has been an essential and evenhanded voice on the subject) and eventually picked up by the Trump administration, there was self-reinforcing pressure — among journalists who covered the story and Twitter experts who opined on it — to put the possibility in the QAnon box and leave it there.

I will leave it to the reader to consider how a similar pressure might manifest itself in other areas, from the 2020-21 murder spike to the recent rise in anti-Semitic violence, where journalists might wish to avoid making concessions to conservative interpretations of reality.

 
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But let me offer a narrower addition to the media critique. One key change to mainstream journalism in the Trump era was the impulse to tell the reader exactly what to think, lest by leaving anything ambiguous you gave an inch to right-wing demagogy. It was not enough to simply report, “Republican politician X said conspiratorial-sounding thing Y.” You also had to specifically describe the conspiratorial thing as false or debunked misinformation, in a way that once would have been considered editorializing, so as to leave no doubt in the vulnerable reader’s mind.

I’m very skeptical that this achieved its intended purpose. (Has anyone drawn to a conspiracy theory been disabused by seeing it described as such in the mainstream media?) But even if it sometimes did, it also created expansive pressures to describe more and more things without any ambiguity and shading, and judge more and more right-wing claims pre-emptively. Which is only a good rule for a truth-seeking profession if you assume the day will never come when Tom Cotton has a point.

Strikingly, though, both Chait and Yglesias argue that this media critique is the most important thing we can take away from the Covid origins debate. “I don’t know if this hypothesis will ever be proven,” Chait writes of the lab leak theory, and “I don’t care,” because “there’s no important policy question riding on the answer.”

This seems mistaken. Yes, if we never figure out the truth of Covid’s origins, the dangers of media groupthink will be the only lesson we can draw for absolutely certain. But if we could find out the truth, and it turned out that the Wuhan Institute of Virology really was the epicenter of a once-in-a-century pandemic, the revelation would itself be a major political and scientific event.

First, to the extent that the United States is engaged in a conflict of propaganda and soft power with the regime in Beijing, there’s a pretty big difference between a world where the Chinese regime can say, We weren’t responsible for Covid but we crushed the virus and the West did not, because we’re strong and they’re decadent, and a world where this was basically their Chernobyl except their incompetence and cover-up sickened not just one of their own cities but also the entire globe.

The latter scenario would also open a debate about how the United States should try to enforce international scientific research safeguards, or how we should operate in a world where they can’t be reasonably enforced. Perhaps that debate would ultimately tilt away from China hawks, as David Frum arguesin The Atlantic, because the lesson of a lab leak would be that we actually need “more binding of China to the international order, more cross-border health and safety standards, more American scientists in Chinese labs, and concomitantly, more Chinese scientists in American labs.” Or perhaps instead you would have an attempted scientific and academic embargo, an end to the kind of funding that flowed to the Wuhan Institute of Virology from the U.S.A.I.D., an attempt to manage risk with harder borders, stricter travel restrictions, de-globalization.

Either way, this debate would also affect science policy at home, opening arguments the likes of which we haven’t seen since the era of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island about the risks of scientific hubris and cutting-edge research. This is especially true if there’s any chance that the Covid-19 virus was engineered, in so-called gain of function research, to be more transmissible and lethal — a possibility raised by, among others, a former science writer for this newspaper, Nicholas Wade. But even if it wasn’t, the mere existence of that research, heretofore a subject of obscure intra-scientific controversy, would become a matter of intense public attention and scrutiny.

That scrutiny might not lead to wise decisions, just as the panic over nuclear power arguably led both energy policy and environmentalism astray. To return to the bet with which we started, the regulation of science has to exist in a balance between Martin Rees and Steven Pinker, between healthy pessimism about human blundering and healthy ambition about what human ingenuity can do. If the pandemic blossomed from a reckless blunder, any reckoning could easily go awry, with a crusade for safety pushing us deeper into technological stagnation.

But if we find out that a single laboratory and a few scientists are responsible for one of the greatest human catastrophes in generations, it’s no use to wish the reckoning away.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/29/opinion/wuhan-lab-leak-theory-covid.html
 

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Trey3216

Trey3216 15346

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On 5/27/2021 at 10:27 AM, wildcat09 said:

Most people who consider themselves real logical guys aren't actually even remotely close to how they perceive themselves. Even saying there's one "rational" response to something as big as questions about how the government and private enterprise should respond to a pandemic, while appealing in some respects, is probably so simplistic that it's just wrong. 

However, while the field of political neuroscience is still young, we do know that liberals and conservatives literally have different brains. I don't want to delve into this too much because it's still a new field and I don't really know much about it, but we know enough now to know that a liberal's brain reacts to things differently than a conservative's brain does. We're not just two warring tribes with the same intensity of commitment to different versions of the same things. 

Calvin Candie | Please Kill the Messenger

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