Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[Dr. Strangelove]

Josh Mandel is running for Senate (there are 3 other significant candidates) and he's been trying to make himself stand out by being the most unapologetic asshole he can possibly be. He believes that's how you win the support of Trump voters and frankly...he might not be wrong.

After he posted the tweet below, the waitress got sent home. The brewery deleted its Twitter account because it was getting bombarded with criticism for "forcing" its workers to come in when sick during a pandemic. Mandel then did a 180 and started piling on himself, saying that the owners were scared of the "woke mob". The owners for their part say they had no idea who he was and it wasn't any sort of preplanned campaign stop.

https://www.13abc.com/2021/08/22/josh-mandel-tweets-about-inside-five-employee-going-work-sick/

[Obi-Jon]

I also completely support the withdrawal from Afganistan. I don't care what the media reports, this decision was made before July. We should have been pulling out the US citizens and Afgani interpreters months ago. Obama failed to do so as he promised and Trump should have as he originally planned. Kudos to Biden for pulling the trigger but a bitchslap for doing so without a thought out withdrawal plan. No one with an IQ above 50 didn't realize the Afgan army and gov't would melt away like ice cream on a hot August day.

I feverishly hope this is our last and final attempt at nation building. Yes, we are a good hearted nation, but a line needs to be drawn for our own sake.

Sitting in the hospital with brain fog too thick to read, I was subjected to hospital television. Direct TV with 6 sports channels covering Ubekistani camel polo, 3 QVC channels, MSNBC and Fox News. MSNBC is the fear mongering channel, covering Covid, Afganistan, covid, Haiti, and covid. Always the worst possible case scenario, the world is at its end, the sky is falling. Always without relevant content. Fox News must have been bought by the Chicom propaganda arm as the intent on that channel is to turn Americans against each other. Had Trump initiated the Afganistan withdrawal, I doubt if Fox would have had the ticker line screaming "Trump rebuilds ISIS with withdrawal policy!!!" like they say with Biden. Where the heck is this generation's Walter Cronkite that accurately reports the news? Unbiased truth doesn't matter anymore, only the number of clicks and eyeballs on train wreck tv. Ugh.

[iam416]

I think the significant majority of folks agree with the overall decision to leave Afghanistan. I think the significant majority of folks are stunned at the execution. I mean, legitimately stunned. I think that's a significant problem for Biden because, as I've noted, he is the "competence" president. He's the "grown up in the room." Or whatever. That well-cultivated image took a real hit over the past 10 days.

So, there's lots of angles to the withdrawal fiasco. I don't think the actual withdrawal will directly affect many voters in 2022 or 2024, but I do think it's a dent in the armor that will have a lasting impact.

[iam416]

IMO, there are far more channels and newspapers in line or general agreement with MSNBC than FOX. Like, waaaaay more. The narratives of fear aren't limited, in any conceivable way, to MSNBC.

FOX is way more of a lone wolf, which probably explains why it's ratings are better -- the Left has multiple options; the Right has one. It's certainly not due to the quality of programming.

[Cody_Russell]

I see it as:

Far Left -
The Young Turks, Huffington Post, significant loud (yet small) portion of Twitter. Note that many of these people are probably not US citizens.

Left -
CNN, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, CBS, Bloomberg, Yahoo, Apple, Google, all big name Social Media, NY Times, Washington Post. etc.

Middle -
Most local news.

Right -
Fox News (far right depending on the show)

Far Right -
OANN.

[foxhopper]

Who are the Americans left? Besides aid workers and maybe Afghan American family members, who else is over there worth getting out? Crappy journalists, arms brokers, drug dealers and money launderers?

PS-Talking strictly about Americans.

[Kapture1]

Who are the Americans left? Besides aid workers and maybe Afghan American family members, who else is over there worth getting out? Crappy journalists, arms brokers, drug dealers and money launderers?

PS-Talking strictly about Americans.

Contractors.

The amount of money you can make as an electrical engineer or a construction contractor over there? It's like double what you can make here.

[Kapture1]

The brewery deleted its Twitter account because it was getting bombarded with criticism for "forcing" its workers to come in when sick during a pandemic.

which is most likely not the case, but the left wing activists on twitter are famous for this.

[CGVT]

I see it as:

Far Left -
The Young Turks, Huffington Post, significant loud (yet small) portion of Twitter. Note that many of these people are probably not US citizens.

Left -
CNN, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, CBS, Bloomberg, Yahoo, Apple, Google, all big name Social Media, NY Times, Washington Post. etc.

Middle -
Most local news.

Right -
Fox News (far right depending on the show)

Far Right -
OANN.

Local news is not middle if it is Sinclair Broadcasting. They are FOX News in disguise

[Kapture1]

Local news is not middle if it is Sinclair Broadcasting. They are FOX News in disguise

and as you can see, they can't stand the right having a single voice.


I don't watch tv, but I would put talk radio in on the right row.

[iam416]

Cody:

I think your breakdown is by and large correct.

[Jeff Buchanan]

I'm always looking for clean data. It is that kind of data that should guide SARS2 public health policy at the federal, state and local level. It's been a while since I have visited this chart - excess mortality. From the link I provided below:

Excess mortality is a term used in epidemiology and public health that refers to the number of deaths from all causes during a crisis above and beyond what we would have expected to see under ‘normal’ conditions.¹ In this case, we’re interested in how the number of deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic compares to the deaths we would have expected had the pandemic not occurred — a crucial quantity that cannot be known but can be estimated in several ways.

Excess mortality is a more comprehensive measure of the total impact of the pandemic on deaths than the confirmed COVID-19 death count alone. It captures not only the confirmed deaths, but also COVID-19 deaths that were not correctly diagnosed and reported² as well as deaths from other causes that are attributable to the overall crisis conditions.

While the raw number of deaths helps give us a rough sense of scale, this measure has its limitations, including being less comparable across countries due to large differences in populations.

A measure that is more comparable across countries is the P-score, which calculates excess mortality as the percentage difference between the number of deaths in 2020–2021 and the average number of deaths in the same period — week or month — over the years 2015–2019

I cant cut and paste the chart here on the lap-top I have available to me on the cruise ship. The link below should take you directly to the chart of P-Scores. It's in interactive chart. I set the chart up to display the P-Scores for the US, Israel, UK and Sweden. I've created a table to show excess mortality defined by P Scores (a P- Score of 100% is double the period 2015-19)

April 2020	January 21	April 21
UK 76%	US 52%	US 4%
Sweden 47%	Sweden 30%	IS 3%
US 45%	UK 25%	Sweden -8%
Israel 5%	Israel 17%	UK -18%

The dates I chose are for obvious comparative reasons - height of the pandemic, Introduction of vaccines, one year later. The chart goes out to August 18th and excess mortality has remained with the country ranges for April getting no worse or no better. The important point here is that vaccines drove excess mortality in the right direction to exceedingly low numbers of excess deaths compared to the peak of the pandemic.

A conclusion I can draw from the P-Scores is that management of COVID either in early intervention of care and in hospitalized COVID patients is very effective. A P-Score analysis renders looking at new case numbers a pretty much useless undertaking. Nevertheless, it appears in the US anyway, that it is new case numbers erroneously driving public health policy and the re imposition of various mitigation measures without any significant PH benefits. The mask mandate debate for K-12 ..... the side that is demanding them - is an example of the illogical reasoning behind the demands for masking kids in classrooms.

https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid

** the link may take you to the excess mortality section but won't retain my country selections I used on the chart. You may have to redo those. The visuals in this chart are stunning wrt ther conclusions that can be drawn from the,

[lineygoblue]

Dangit Jon... you made me agree with CGVT at least twice in the last 24 hours... I'll remember this ...

[Cody_Russell]

Local news is not middle if it is Sinclair Broadcasting. They are FOX News in disguise

I guess it varies because there are so many different local news stations.
Whenever I have it on in the background, they report:
- The weather
- Brief overview of any major political story. Usually avoids analysis.
- Local stories.
- High school sports news.

Would add CNBC and Yahoo Finance in the "middle" category too now that I think about it.

[Obi-Jon]

Bloomberg as a left speaking channel????? Do they have more than one channel that isn't business reporting? My uber conservative CEO had that playing on the TVs scattered about the office and nothing else.