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CR: COVID-19 --Political Talk


Mrs Whiggins

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2 hours ago, jimmyjazz said:

I actually believe he has no idea he's lying.  I think the "truth" for him is whatever pops into his head at any given point in time.  When he contradicts himself, he either doesn't recall any contradictory statements he might have made, or he just doesn't recognize the contradiction at all.  When he tells a lie, to him it's true.

I don't think he harbors a shred of the ability to discern right from wrong.

i dealt with this for several years as my old boss was exactly like this. you could see the evolution of what his version of the truth was in real-time. 

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3 hours ago, Bama Chick said:

This man is my spirit animal.

 

How much evidence do we need before admitting America is a crumbling society? There's no rebounding from the damage that's been done already and the crisis from the pandemic is only speeding up the downfall. 

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16 hours ago, Biff Tannen said:

God, the DT thread is totally useless.  No actual info, just people screaming that it's not the CR.

The thread on Board Discussion became a safe space for certain posters to vent as well.  Naturally it’s the same group of posters in both, many of whom are/were regulars here of a certain political bent.  

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1 hour ago, Homercles said:

The thread on Board Discussion became a safe space for certain posters to vent as well.  Naturally it’s the same group of posters in both, many of whom are/were regulars here of a certain political bent.  

To them, the fact that there aren't 100000 dead yet with 10000 dying per day is a total victory.

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13 hours ago, henrygandorf said:

sidenote, he keeps mentioning these 20 states that are ready to reopen sooner than others (really 29 he keeps saying).  i just looked on worldo, and if 29 is the number, that would basically be every state currently reporting ~5000 or fewer cases (missouri is 30th with 4895).  dude likes round numbers.

And of course with no attention paid to their rate of growth.  In this decision, velocity (how many new people are getting it per day) and acceleration (whether the velocity is increasing) are more important than position (how many people have it.)  On March 10, the US was at 787 confirmed cases.  Today we have 644k.  Without some painful social isolation, it would be much worse.  

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27 minutes ago, SimonBolivar said:

I guess the whole "tHe fLu kIlLs 30,000 a yEaR!!!" excuse is finally over with.

Flu deaths by state for 2018:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/flu_pneumonia_mortality/flu_pneumonia.htm

NY State had 4,700 flu deaths over 12 months.  The virus had killed 11,500 in just about two months.  Just like the flu.....

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9 hours ago, Bama Chick said:

 

 


f0ad50f7ed3ae3a4f18b12838a64fda4.jpg

 

 

9 hours ago, elfenix said:

so many connections to russia

Putin’s Long War Against American Science
A decade of health disinformation promoted by President Vladimir Putin of Russia has sown wide confusion, hurt major institutions and encouraged the spread of deadly illnesses.

On Feb. 3, soon after the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus to be a global health emergency, an obscure Twitter account in Moscow began retweeting an American blog. It said the pathogen was a germ weapon designed to incapacitate and kill. The headline called the evidence “irrefutable” even though top scientists had already debunked that claim and declared the novel virus to be natural.

As the pandemic has swept the globe, it has been accompanied by a dangerous surge of false information — an “infodemic,” according to the World Health Organization. Analysts say that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has played a principal role in the spread of false information as part of his wider effort to discredit the West and destroy his enemies from within.

The House, the Senate and the nation’s intelligence agencies have typically focused on election meddling in their examinations of Mr. Putin’s long campaign. But the repercussions are wider. An investigation by The New York Times — involving scores of interviews as well as a review of scholarly papers, news reports, and Russian documents, tweets and TV shows — found that Mr. Putin has spread misinformation on issues of personal health for more than a decade.

His agents have repeatedly planted and spread the idea that viral epidemics — including flu outbreaks, Ebola and now the coronavirus — were sown by American scientists. The disinformers have also sought to undermine faith in the safety of vaccines, a triumph of public health that Mr. Putin himself promotes at home.

Moscow’s aim, experts say, is to portray American officials as downplaying the health alarms and thus posing serious threats to public safety.

“It’s all about seeding lack of trust in government institutions,” Peter Pomerantsev, author of “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible,” a 2014 book on Kremlin disinformation, said in an interview.

The Russian president has waged his long campaign by means of open media, secretive trolls and shadowy blogs that regularly cast American health officials as patronizing frauds. Of late, new stealth and sophistication have made his handiwork harder to see, track and fight.

Even so, the State Department recently accused Russia of using thousands of social media accounts to spread coronavirus misinformation — including a conspiracy theory that the United States engineered the deadly pandemic.

The Kremlin’s audience for open disinformation is surprisingly large. The YouTube videos of RT, Russia’s global television network, average one million views per day, “the highest among news outlets,” according to a U.S. intelligence report. Since the founding of the Russian network in 2005, its videos have received more than four billion views, analysts recently concluded.

Because public interest in wellness and longevity runs high, health disinformation can have a disproportionally large social impact. Experts fear that it will foster public cynicism that erodes Washington’s influence as well as the core democratic value of relying on demonstrable facts as a basis for decision-making.

“The accumulation of these operations over a long period of time will result in a major political impact,” Ladislav Bittman, a former Soviet bloc disinformation officer, said in explaining the Kremlin’s long-game rationale.

Sandra C. Quinn, a professor of public health at the University of Maryland who has followed Mr. Putin’s vaccine scares for more than a half-decade, said the Russian president was drawing on an old playbook. “The difference now is the speed with which it spreads, and the denigration of the institutions that we rely on to understand the truth,” she said in an interview. “I think we’re in dangerous territory.”

Spoiler

 

Living weapons
As a young man, Mr. Putin served in the K.G.B., the Soviet Union’s main intelligence agency, from 1975 to 1991. He worked in foreign intelligence, which required its officers to spend a quarter of their time conceiving and implementing plans for sowing disinformation. What Mr. Putin accomplished is unclear. But public accounts show that he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel, and that his 16-year tenure coincided with a major K.G.B. operation to deflect attention from Moscow’s secret arsenal of biological weapons, which it built in contravention of a treaty signed with the United States in 1972.

The K.G.B. campaign — which cast the deadly virus that causes AIDS as a racial weapon developed by the American military to kill black citizens — was wildly successful. By 1987, fake news stories had run in 25 languages and 80 countries, undermining American diplomacy, especially in Africa. After the Cold War, in 1992, the Russians admitted that the alarms were fraudulent.

As Russia’s president and prime minister, Mr. Putin has embraced and expanded the playbook, linking any natural outbreak to American duplicity. Attacking the American health system, and faith in it, became a hallmark of his rule.

At first, his main disseminator of fake news was Russia Today, which he founded in 2005 in Moscow; in 2008 it was renamed RT, obscuring its Russian origins.

Early in 2009, a particularly virulent flu, named H1N1, swept the globe, and thousands of people died. That year, the network featured the conspiratorial views of Wayne Madsen, a regular contributor in Washington whom it described as an investigative journalist. In at least nine shows and text bulletins, Mr. Madsen characterized the deadly germ as bioengineered. “The world is actually fighting a man-made tragedy,” one bulletin declared.

 

That June, Mr. Madsen told RT viewers that the virus makers had worked at a shadowy mix of laboratories, including the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Md. The institute’s official job is to help defend the United States against the kinds of pathogens that Mr. Madsen accused it of creating.

In a follow-up show, Mr. Madsen said the virus had been spliced together from other flu strains, including the virus responsible for the 1918 pandemic, and likened its creators to the mad scientists of “Jurassic Park,” the hit movie about resurrected dinosaurs. RT’s chyron for the show characterized the result as “Germ Warfare.”

In 2010, the network founded a new arm, RT America, a few blocks from the White House. Mr. Madsen became a regular on-camera guest.

In 2012 Mr. Putin added the military to his informational arsenal. His newly appointed head of the Russian Army, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, laid out a new doctrine of war that stressed public messaging as a means of stirring foreign dissent. That same year, a shadowy group of trolls in St. Petersburg began using Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to fire salvos of junk information at millions of Americans. The goals were to boost social polarization and damage the reputation of federal agencies.

A rich opportunity arose in 2014 when Ebola swept West Africa. It was the worst-ever outbreak of the hemorrhagic fever, eventually claiming more than 10,000 lives.

RT’s gallery of alleged criminals once again included the U.S. Army. The network profiled an accusation by Cyril Broderick, a former plant pathologist, who claimed in a Liberian newspaper article that the outbreak was an American plot to turn Africans into bioweapon guinea pigs, and cited the AIDS accusation as supporting evidence.

 

The RT presenter noted that the United States was spending hundreds of millions of dollars to aid Ebola victims in Africa but added: “It can’t buy back the world’s trust.”

The trolls in St. Petersburg amplified the claim on Twitter. The deadly virus “is government made,” one tweet declared. Another series of tweets called the microorganism “just a regular bio weapon.” The idea found an audience. The hip-hop artist Chris Brown echoed it in 2014, telling his 13 million Twitter followers, “I think this Ebola epidemic is a form of population control.”

C.D.C. in the cross hairs
Mr. Putin’s campaign of health misinformation was now a global enterprise, with the creative energy of a fun house and the ability to strike anywhere.

The next target was the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States’ flagship public health agency. In late 2014, a rash of fake news reports falsely claimed that an Ebola victim in Liberia had been flown to Atlanta, starting a local outbreak. A YouTube video showed what it described as C.D.C. personnel, in hazmat suits, receiving and moving the patient in secret. The deceptive video included a truck bearing the logo of the Atlanta airport.

A rush of tweets turned up the volume. “Panic here in ATL!!” one stated. Another exclaimed, “OMG! Ebola is everywhere!”

As the Kremlin grew more confident, it began to simply recycle old narratives rather than wait for new epidemics to emerge. In 2017, Russian trolls used Twitter to give the AIDS falsehood new life. This time the claimed perpetrator was Dr. Robert Gallo, a scientist who in 1984 had actually helped discover the virus that causes AIDS. The tweets quoted him, falsely, as saying he had designed the pathogen to depopulate humanity. The trolls cited a website, World Truth. Its video attacking Dr. Gallo registered nearly four million views.

Six researchers centered at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that, over decades, the false narratives around AIDS had fostered a “lack of trust” among African-Americans that kept many from seeking medical care. Their 2018 study, of hundreds of black men in Los Angeles who have sex with men, reported that nearly half the interviewees thought the virus responsible for AIDS had been manufactured. And more than one-fifth viewed people who take new protective drugs as “human guinea pigs for the government.”

Beleaguered defenders
Within Russia, Mr. Putin has been a staunch proponent of vaccines.

“I make sure I get my vaccinations in time, before the flu season starts,” he told listeners to a 2016 call-in show. At a televised meeting with doctors in St. Petersburg, in 2018, he scolded Russian parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids: “They endanger the lives of their own children.”

Calling the issue “very important,” he warned of possible administrative steps to speed the pace of childhood immunizations. Last fall, Russia’s health authorities laid out expanded rules that require strict new adherence to protocols for childhood vaccination.

At the same time, Mr. Putin has worked hard to encourage Americans to see vaccinations as dangerous and federal health officials as malevolent. The threat of autism is a regular theme of this anti-vaccine campaign. The C.D.C. has repeatedly ruled out the possibility that vaccinations lead to autism, as have many scientists and top journals. Nonetheless the false narrative has proliferated, spread by Russian trolls and media.

Moreover, the disinformation has sought to implicate the C.D.C. in a cover-up. For years, tweets originating in St. Petersburg have claimed that the health agency muzzled a whistle-blower to hide evidence that vaccines cause autism, especially in male African-American infants. Medical experts have dismissed the allegation, but it reverberated.

In a series of 2015 tweets, Russian trolls promoted a video of a black minister in Los Angeles addressing a rally. “They’re not just shooting us with guns,” he told the audience. “They’re killing us with needles.” The minister and accompanying text in the video claimed that childhood immunizations had caused autism in 200,000 black children.

RT America echoed the charge. It focused on “Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe,” a 2016 film by Andrew Wakefield, a discredited anti-vaccine activist. When the film was pulled from the Tribeca Film Festival after a public outcry, the network aired an interview with its creators. “Can we trust the C.D.C. on vaccines?” a plug for the show asked.

Russian trolls fired off tweets containing links to the film and a fund-raising site for its promotion. One claimed that autism rates were about to skyrocket to “1 in 2” vaccinated children.

Mr. Putin’s disinformation blitz has coincided with a drop in vaccination rates among children in the United States and a rise in measles, a disease once considered vanquished. The virus, especially in infants and young children, can cause fevers and brain damage. Last year, according to the C.D.C., the United States had 1,282 new cases, a record in recent decades; of these, 128 involved hospitalizations and 61 resulted in major complications such as pneumonia and encephalitis.

The new threat
The Moscow site that retweeted the coronavirus blog in February belongs to a Russian news outlet called The Russophile. It is tauntingly bold. The author portrait on its Twitter page shows an unidentifiable soldier in green fatigues holding an orange tabby cat. The background image is a colorized Kremlin mosaic. The site calls itself a “news feed from free (= not owned by the globalist elite) media.”

On the site’s About page, under the heading “Some more reasons for our existence,” is a quote attributed to President Abraham Lincoln: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”

The website lists its owner’s name as OOOKremlinTrolls and its street address as an imposing building next door to the offices of Lukoil, a Russian oil giant tied to Cambridge Analytica’s digital campaigns to sway American voters. “It’s a nice part of town,” Darren L. Linvill, a Clemson University expert who uncovered the retweets, said of the Russophile address.

The site epitomizes the complicated nature of the new threat, parts of which have evolved to become more open, while others have grown stealthier. “It’s a cloud of Russian influencers,” said Dr. Linvill, a professor of communications who has studied millions of troll postings. The players, he said, probably include state actors, intelligence operatives, former RT staff members and the digital teams of Yevgeny Prigozhin, a secretive oligarch and confident of Mr. Putin’s who financed the St. Petersburg troll farm.

The new brand of disinformation is subtler than the old. Dr. Linvill and his colleague Patrick L. Warren have argued that Mr. Putin’s new methodology seeks less to create than to curate — to retweet and amplify the existing American cacophony, raising the level of confusion and partisan discord.

Much of the disinformation, like the Russophile site, lies hidden in plain sight. But other elements embody a new sophistication that makes it increasingly hard for tech companies to ferret out the interference of Russia, or any other country. Experts say that Russian trolls may even be paying Americans to post disinformation on their behalf, to better hide their digital fingerprints.

On March 5, Lea Gabrielle, head of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which seeks to identify and fight disinformation, told a Senate hearing that Moscow had pounced on the coronavirus outbreak as a new opportunity to sow chaos and division — to “take advantage of a health crisis where people are terrified.”

“The entire ecosystem of Russian disinformation has been engaged,” she reported. Her center’s analysts and partners, Ms. Gabrielle added, have found “Russian state proxy websites, official state media, as well as swarms of online false personas pushing out false narratives.”

RT America dismissed the department’s charges, which were first made in February, as “loosely detailed.” In her March testimony, Ms. Gabrielle said that her center had intentionally made public few details and examples of the disinformation, so that adversaries could not decipher “our tradecraft,” presumably in an effort to foil countermeasures.

Tass, the Russian news agency, reported that the Foreign Ministry firmly rejected the State Department’s charge. That response echoes an iron rule of disinformation. As Oleg Kalugin, a former K.G.B. general, put it in a video interview with The Times: “Deny, deny, deny — even if the truth is obvious.”

Beijing now appears to be borrowing from Mr. Putin’s playbook, at least the early drafts. It recently declared that the coronavirus was devised by Washington as a designer weapon meant to cripple China.

Mr. Putin has disseminated false and alarming health narratives not only about pathogens and vaccines but also about radio waves, bioengineered genes, industrial chemicals and other intangibles of modern life. The knotty topics often defy public understanding, making them ideal candidates for sowing confusion over what’s safe and dangerous.

Analysts see an effort not only to undermine American officials but also to accomplish something more basic: to damage American science, a foundation of national prosperity. American researchers have won more than 100 Nobel Prizes since 2000, and Russians five. Geographically, Russia is the world’s largest country, but its economy is smaller than Italy’s.

As Dr. Quinn of the University of Maryland put it, Mr. Putin’s salvos are targeting “the institutions that we rely on to understand the truth.”

 

 

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5 minutes ago, Hiphopopotamos said:

Thank you BOA for fucking over customers who didn't already have a business loan with you.  We had to wait a day to apply - and it looks like that cost us the opportunity at a PPP loan.

I have little doubt they will approve another round of loans, but yea, thats shitty.  In fairness to the banks, they were handed a half-baked plan on how to roll this out, and some were leery of throwing money at people without clear guidance on the impacts to both sides of the loan.   

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4 minutes ago, 4th&Five said:

It’s a month of minimum wage ($7.25 for 40 hours a week for 4 weeks) pay but people are supposed to stretch it for 2.5 months?

Of course not.  Don't be ridiculous.  You also have unemployment (that no one can sign up for because every state's system is overwhelmed) and the $600 they gave on top of unemployment. 

You'll be fine.  Just try eating fewer avocado toasts this week.

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5 minutes ago, workswithseed said:

Yeah, hell my family was saying it a couple months back as I grabbed beans and rice. 

I started to pay attention in January.

My mom was telling me yesterday about how ridiculous all of this was and how we needed to get back to work. She also said granny was ready to pass if that had to happen. So you know...lovely

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3 hours ago, SimonBolivar said:

I guess the whole "tHe fLu kIlLs 30,000 a yEaR!!!" excuse is finally over with.

the flu kills 30,000 a year [without social distancing] at a realtiviely stable, predictable rate of which we have a vaccine for.

Covid-19 killed 30,000 in two months [with social distancing] with an increasing, unpredictable rate of which there is no vaccine for.

The flu comparison has been moronic from the start.

Edited by yoladu
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5 minutes ago, yoladu said:

the flu kills 30,000 a year [without social distancing] at a realtiviely stable, predictable rate of which we have a vaccine for.

Covid-19 killed 30,000 in two months [with social distancing] with an increasing, unpredictable rate of which there is no vaccine for.

The flu comparison has been moronic from the start.

Maybe, but if Hillary had kept her emails on a secure government server in her office, none of this would've happened.  

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man I'm getting the grimm outlook on the medical coding industry for 2020 now that CMS has halted Audits til next year.. meanwhile it's business as usual for the outsourced Indian companies who are coding charts.. Why do we even have HIPAA for?

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35 minutes ago, Hiphopopotamos said:

Of course not.  Don't be ridiculous.  You also have unemployment (that no one can sign up for because every state's system is overwhelmed) and the $600 they gave on top of unemployment. 

You'll be fine.  Just try eating fewer avocado toasts this week.

And the fed 600 is tied to your state eligibility. So skip SBX too.

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Some one mentioned these dipshits that created gridlock yesterday. Basically all these groups that do not find it enough to protest since they can be easily be ignored have to make folks life's miserable and achieve no more than feeling good about screwing with others. So I went out looking for 2003 war protesters, black lives matter and tea party folks images. I found this photo:

48397282_303.jpg

 

I wonder how these folks are feeling now that mother earth has taken care of pollution levels itself.

 

 

 

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34 minutes ago, Thiefery said:

man I'm getting the grimm outlook on the medical coding industry for 2020 now that CMS has halted Audits til next year.. meanwhile it's business as usual for the outsourced Indian companies who are coding charts.. Why do we even have HIPAA for?

Mrs. MO is a supervisor for a medical billing company. We are both working from home and she has been ranting about this as well. 

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12 minutes ago, GRHorn said:

 

First, lol that you think this guy is worth quoting.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/before-demanding-every-member-cast-a-covid-19-vote-tom-massie-skipped-a-covid-19-vote-for-a-fundraiser

Quote

Massie’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment as to why he missed the March 14 vote. A spokesperson for his congressional office did note that the vote was announced 15 minutes before it was held. However, lawmakers had been instructed all week to remain in D.C. for an expected vote on the $850 billion relief package, which focused on shoring up the U.S. public health system and expanding sick leave. That Massie skipped town anyway suggests that the principled approach he would demand from his colleagues a week later was as inherently political as his critics claimed it to be. 

To his point.  Nurses have to get close to people to do their jobs, but (should) have access to the most PPE of any of the listed jobs.  Truckers can self isolate in their vehicle while doing their jobs.  Farmers can largely self isolate while doing their jobs.  Grocers are getting hung out, just like bus drivers, but ideally we would limit the highest risk categories of people from doing those jobs if possible.  In a perfect world we would be protecting them like our nurses and doctors, but we know where that rabbit hole leads.

Congress is literally full of the highest risk population, mostly 60+ year olds, and most of the stuff they do is face to face in cramped meeting rooms.  Do we take PPE away from nurses so congress can meet in person to make blustering idiots like Massey happy?  I know Rs are willing to create martyrs out of olds to keep the economy running, but like many leaders, the martyrdom talk is always intended for someone else.  

Congress should be able to function mostly remotely, but its like most thing, the older people are, the less they trust technology.  My guess is the biggest problem is none of these guys want any chance of a recording being made of all their grifting, under the table deals, impolite discussion, etc.  The leaks would be spectacular.  

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/26/congress-virtual-remote-work-coronavirus-150362

Quote

For Baird, the appropriate symbol is the Roman fasces that sit behind the rostrum on the House floor: A bronze bundle of sticks, held together by a strap, meant to symbolize the strength of states joined together. The togetherness is important, but it’s also a risk. “They’re stronger for breakage” he says. “They’re not safer from fire. If they’re distributed, they’re a lot harder to take down.”

“And,” says Baird, “technology allows us to do that and still be united.”

 

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