Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[AlabamAlum]

lol

[Dr. Strangelove]

Esper tells NBC he had no idea Trump was going to remove all protesters from the park by force and thought they were just going to look at vandalism at the park bathroom...lol

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-s-church-photo-op-took-defense-secretary-esper-gen-n1222391

[Dr. Strangelove]

Good.

Unfortunately, AA, your local Applebees’s no longer has enough servers to remain open. Depriving you of your constitutional right to 2 for $20

[AlabamAlum]

Look, if you have a curfew, you have a curfew. Arrest, detain, ticket, inconvenience. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Or don’t have a curfew.

Because having a curfew and allowing people to ignore it sets a horrible precedent and it opens the door to other issues.

[Hannibal]

Perfect

[Dr. Strangelove]

Steve King is getting thrown out of Congress. I don’t care if this makes it much harder for the Dem to win; its a beautiful thing.

[iam416]

Look, if you have a curfew, you have a curfew. Arrest, detain, ticket, inconvenience. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Or don’t have a curfew.

Because having a curfew and allowing people to ignore it sets a horrible precedent and it opens the door to other issues.

I can't inagine anyone disagreeimg with this, but here we are.

[iam416]

Meanwhile, De Blasio, who, I think, has managed to surpass PDJT over the past few months*, insists that businesses and churches will remain CLOSED in NYC. After, there's a pandemic going on.

(*)-PDJT scores higher in optical disasters; De Blasio is throw the roof in actual policy diisaster

[Dr. Strangelove]

Look, if you have a curfew, you have a curfew. Arrest, detain, ticket, inconvenience. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Or don’t have a curfew.

Because having a curfew and allowing people to ignore it sets a horrible precedent and it opens the door to other issues.

For the record, I was more laughing at it taking 5 dozen cops to handle this riot of teenagers ("riot" being the biological term for a group of teenagers).

[AlabamAlum]

For the record, I was more laughing at it taking 5 dozen cops to handle this riot of teenagers ("riot" being the biological term for a group of teenagers).

Always have more than you need. And be nice. Because if you don’t and they start resisting, if becomes a fight and the teens end up getting hurt.

Look, accept the teachings of John Dalton from “Road House” (the greatest American film of all time) or don’t. But if you don’t, the Double Deuce will never change.

[Dr. Strangelove]

I'm sure hanni hates it but the polite refusal of the Ohio Republican leadership to go the full Trump is at times fairly impressive. Over the past 24 hours Portman tells Trump he needs to be doing more to bring the country together and DeWine says Ohio has no interest in being a replacement host for the RNC. Says hosting a mass indoor gathering of that size this summer is not something he'd voluntarily do.

[Dr. Strangelove]

As a lot of Europe reopens Sweden is reevaluating its strategy. The prime architect of the strategy now doubts they made all the right moves.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-03/man-behind-sweden-s-virus-strategy-says-he-got-some-things-wrong

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/03/architect-of-sweden-coronavirus-strategy-admits-too-many-died-anders-tegnell

[iam416]

They probably should have proceeded with a bit more caution, but the interesting thing is the absolute numbers. Sweden is judged in relative numbers (vs Norway -- never Ireland). But in absolute numbers if you were to say 4500 deaths or 450/million, you probably wouldn't really bat an eye. Those aren't catastrophic numbers.

In any event, the Covid-19 outrage is now officially dead. The protests/riots forever killed that off. It's going to take quite the effort from the Media to stoke up Covid-19 fears again whilst ignoring the protests/riots. Don't get me wrong -- they could certainly do it -- I guess if you say the protests were provoked then the blatant disregard for social distancing is, like all other bad things, the fault of White Folks. That's definitely in their wheelhouse. But it would be so brazen that I think it may even touch on whatever shame they have.

I mean, FFS, Biden emerged from his basement to speak in public. Things MUST be safe.

[Jeff Buchanan]

In the shit-ton of news that pops up in my email or news feeds that I read, for good or for bad with respect to my disposition on any given day, this is a very good NYT article on SARS-COV-2. It takes the virologists jargon on display in understanding SARS-COV-2 and makes it understandable to non-virologist types. The link is below, it may or may not be pay-walled and members here may or may not be interested in it. The takeaways (through my lens, of course):

• It's a "novel" cold (corona) virus that's more than likely been around for a long time and probably mutated from primordial soup. There is no way it was manipulated or engineered putting to rest conspiracy theories that it was a bio-weapon. That doesn't change my view that once China knew about this, and the article suggests this could have been sometime around, or even before, early November, the PRC authorities kept wrongly silent about it. Once it was out in the open, the PRC worked to optimize it's position, advantage itself, in relationship to other countries.
• What makes it "novel" is that it has more ways of getting into human cells and taking over the reproductive machinery of them than any coronavirus previously studied and, remarkably, the common cold virus hasn't been studied that much. It is being studied now BIG TIME.
• SARS-COV-2, in as much as is known about it so far, and in comparison to other viruses that make the leap from one host (e.g., bats and about 50 other typical hosts) to humans, it is more capable of making that transition than any virus that has been labeled as causing pandemics in the past. That is a known not so much about its R(0) or infectivity value but rather about the ease by which, once it is in human host cells, it reproduces itself, multiples and wreaks havoc in the human body.
• Its pathway is largely understood but that it produces such a wide range of symptoms from none to death remains a mystery. What that means to us (to me, actually) is that we really can't know if we're sitting next to an asymptomatic shedder who will never get sick, get tested or get counted as new case. We also can't know the end point of the disease if we become infected.
• The good news embodied in the bad news is that this is one of the many focuses of the unprecedented level of study of the virus. A side note - not in this article but one I read yesterday and now it makes sense - there are several drug companies that are working on diagnostic tools that look at antibodies of infected persons as means of predicting how sick they will get. These are quite far along in development, like we could see these in clinical use in a matter of weeks or months. If you do get sick, develop symptoms and go to the doctor, there's a good chance those doctors will know how to manage your case and treat you.
• The virus hasn't mutated which is good for the development of vaccines and therapeutics but bad in that, not only is it, at baseline, a very effective survivor in terms of it's ability to defeat the innate human immune response, but it doesn't wane - burn out is the better term - and disappear like most other viruses we've faced in the past. So, as most of us here have accepted, until a vaccine is developed to either eradicate or blunt the severity of disease caused by the virus, we are going to have to deal with it. By extension, and in my view, without contributing to the increasing economic and social costs of this thing by misguided and/or politically motivated policy decisions that keep social and economic activity muzzeled.
• The understanding that the virus hasn't mutated and won't go away is behind recent PH authority's announcements that there will be a second wave - that is not so much about re-opening causing that, which it will indeed contribute to it, as it is about the virus's survivability.
• That same understanding is also contributing to worries that any vaccine that is developed won't produce lasting immunity like other vaccine, e.g., MMR v. measles, et. al., does. Keep in mind, that flu vaccines are not permanent immunity producers against that virus either. Currently, these vaccine blunt symptoms if infected or keep you from getting it entirely. You have to get them seasonally for protection. Expect whatever vaccine is developed for SARS-COV-2 will be similar.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/02/h...b2da6e075b25bf

[Dr. Strangelove]

Well I get a lot of that and you've been saying for a while the point of shutdowns is to avoid having the hospitals overrun, not to save every life. And that's true. But that's not the only reason Sweden chose the path they did. The argument was they could preserve life through voluntary social distancing AND preserve the economy better than the rest of Europe at the same time. If you see the comments by the Finance Minister, as it turns out, Sweden doesn't expect its economy to perform any better than the EU average. Right now EU countries have begun opening up travel between each other but nearly everywhere still has travel to Sweden banned for the immediate future.