Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[Dr. Strangelove]

You know I am not a Trump guy. He was so heavily flawed personally that most of his good ideas were doomed by the way he packaged his rhetoric, BUT I don’t think anyone can reasonably argue that he was treated fairly by social media (especially Twitter). After all, they banned him -the President of the United States- from their platform and left Khamenei (as far as I know, still unbanned). I found it shocking. As such, I just don’t visit the site anymore.

So if Trump (or anyone) starts a viable Twitter-like platform where you can say politically incorrect things that do not march lockstep with the SJW agenda, I would support it with my patronage.

I was about to say that there's already a bunch of places like what you're describing but then noticed you said "viable". It seems like most people who exile themselves to Gab or Parler or Gettr or Telegram end up crawling back to more mainstream platforms because they want the fighting and the interactions with people they don't agree with. Echo chambers are fucking BORING.

EDIT: Also the one quick look I got of it made it look more like old-school Facebook. Before all the ads and extra window panes and whatnot.

[AlabamAlum]

I was about to say that there's already a bunch of places like what you're describing but then noticed you said "viable". It seems like most people who exile themselves to Gab or Parler or Gettr or Telegram end up crawling back to more mainstream platforms because they want the fighting and the interactions with people they don't agree with. Echo chambers are fucking BORING.

EDIT: Also the one quick look I got of it made it look more like old-school Facebook. Before all the ads and extra window panes and whatnot.

Re: echo chambers. Exactly. I know what I believe. Challenge me with a different viewpoint. I can entertain it without necessarily adopting it.

And I hate political correctness and the shouting down of opposing thought because it is unpleasant or is counter to the prevailing social winds.

[Hannibal]

I was about to say that there's already a bunch of places like what you're describing but then noticed you said "viable". It seems like most people who exile themselves to Gab or Parler or Gettr or Telegram end up crawling back to more mainstream platforms because they want the fighting and the interactions with people they don't agree with. Echo chambers are fucking BORING.

EDIT: Also the one quick look I got of it made it look more like old-school Facebook. Before all the ads and extra window panes and whatnot.

People want to have access to other people to educate the masses. gab and odyssee do not have that access. Alt tech is also woefully undercapitalized and those sites tend to be a lot less user friendly.

[Dr. Strangelove]

Sort of funny though, the financing of this project is going to unintentionally spark conspiracy theories.

The money is being put up by a company called Digital World Acquisition Group. Not a household name. That's because it mainly seems to be a shell company. Its CEO is a guy named Patrick Orlando. Orlando is also the CEO of another company called Yunhong International, a blank check company that's incorporated in the Cayman islands and its headquarters is in...wait for it...Wuhan, China.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trump-launching-social-media-platform-truth-social/story?id=80697031

[Kapture1]

facebook and twitter need competition that will allow a measure of freedom on it's site.

[Da Geezer]

The NIH finally admits that it funded gain of function research a the Wuhan lab.

I know some of you will just reject the Breitbart article because it is Breitbart, but take a chance. Just read the primary evidence like the actual letter the NIH sent, and the actual words spoken by Fauci and his ilk. The question now is what to do with the folks who lied under oath.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/10/20/nih-contradicts-fauci-admits-funding-gain-of-function-research-at-wuhan-lab/

[Hannibal]

The NIH finally admits that it funded gain of function research a the Wuhan lab.

The question now is what to do with the folks who lied under oath.

Absolutely nothing. They are part of the Liberal mafia.

[Hannibal]

The Left better start throwing out at last a few sacrificial lambs or shit's going to start getting really ugly soon.

[Da Geezer]

Listen to article
Length5 minutes
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Editor’s note: As November’s global climate conference in Glasgow draws near, important facts about climate change don’t always make it into the dominant media coverage. We’re here to help. Each Thursday contributor Bjorn Lomborg will provide some important background so readers can have a better understanding of the true effects of climate change and the real costs of climate policy.



It’s easy to construct climate disasters. You just find a current, disconcerting trend and project it into the future, while ignoring everything humanity could do to adapt. For instance, one widely reported study found that heat waves could kill thousands more Americans by the end of the century if global warming continues apace—but only if you assume people won’t use more air conditioning. Yes, the climate is likely to change, but so is human behavior in response.

Adaptation doesn’t make the cost of global warming go away entirely, but it does reduce it dramatically. Higher temperatures will shrink harvests if farmers keep growing the same crops, but they’re likely to adapt by growing other varieties or different plants altogether. Corn production in North America has shifted away from the Southeast toward the Upper Midwest, where farmers take advantage of longer growing seasons and less-frequent extreme heat. When sea levels rise, governments build defenses—like the levees, flood walls and drainage systems that protected New Orleans from much of Hurricane Ida’s ferocity this year.

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Nonetheless, many in the media push unrealistic projections of climate catastrophes, while ignoring adaptation. A new study documents how the biggest bias in studies on the rise of sea levels is their tendency to ignore human adaptation, exaggerating flood risks in 2100 by as much as 1,300 times. It is also evident in the breathless tone of most reporting: The Washington Post frets that sea level rise could “make 187 million people homeless,” CNN fears an “underwater future,” and USA Today agonizes over tens of trillions of dollars in projected annual flood damage. All three rely on studies that implausibly assume no society across the world will make any adaptation whatever for the rest of the century. This isn’t reporting but scaremongering.

You can see how far from reality these sorts of projections are in one heavily cited study, depicted in the graph nearby If you assume no society will adapt to any sea-level rise between now and 2100, you’ll find that vast areas of the world will be routinely flooded, causing $55 trillion in damage annually in 2100 (expressed in 2005 dollars), or about 5% of global gross domestic product. But as the study emphasizes, “in reality, societies are likely to adapt.”

By raising the height of dikes, the study shows that humanity can negate almost all that terrible projected damage by 2100. Only 15,000 people would be flooded every year, which is a remarkable improvement compared with the 3.4 million people flooded in 2000. The total cost of damage, investments in new dikes, and maintenance costs of existing dikes will fall sixfold between now and 2100 to 0.008% of world GDP.

Adaptation is much more effective than climate regulations at staving off flood risks. Compare the two types of policies in isolation. Without any climate mitigation to help, dikes would still safeguard more than 99.99% of the flood victims you’d see if global warming continued on current trends. Instead of 187 million people flooded in 2100, there would be only 15,000. Climate policy achieves much less on its own. Without adaptation, even stringent regulations that keep the global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius would reduce the number of flood victims only down to 85 million a year by the end of the century.

Stringent climate policy still has only a mild effect when used in concert with dikes: Instead of the 15,000 flood victims you’d get with only adaptation, you’d have 10,000. And getting there would cost hundreds of trillions of dollars, which is hardly mitigated by the $40 billion drop in total flood damage and dike costs climate regulations would achieve. As I’ve explained in these pages before, this kind of policy has a high human cost: the tens of millions of people pricey climate regulations relegate to poverty.

You don’t have to portend doom to take climate change seriously. Ignoring the benefits of adaptation may make for better headlines, but it badly misinforms readers.

Mr. Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.”
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Lomborg was once the head of Greenpeace. This is from today's WSJ

[Hannibal]

All of the catastrophic climate change predictions still come from mathematical models that attempt to mix and match a variety of temperature factors such as moisture, CO2, and so on. The data that is used to calibrate these models is absolute shit, because the Earth is billions of years old, and reliable data that can be used to model the planet's climate is limited to a century at most. We now know though that before mankind existed, the world went through massive climate swings that dwarf the atmospheric temperature changes of the 20th Century. Before civilization, we had an ice age and then a thaw. Before the industrial era, we had warming and cooling periods. The period from about 1600 to 1850 is known as the Little Ice Age. It ended naturally without any help from automobiles. By now, nobody denies that the sun experiences weather of its own and has not maintained a constant intensity throughout the existence of life on Earth. I doubt though that anyone knows the extent to which these cycles affect our temperature. I wouldn't completely write off the possibility that burning fossil fuels can change our environment, but the cost to society of exiting fossil fuels will be enormous and it will lead to a large scale reversal of the prosperity of the 20th Century.

[Hannibal]

You don't need to speculate on whether "climate change" mitigation will cost us trillions. It already has. The market value of Tesla by itself is $800 Billion, and Tesla is a company whose only raison detre is mitigation of "climate change". What else could we have done with that $800 billion? The costs of Al Gore and Greta Thunberg are astronomical.

[Jeff Buchanan]

The NIH finally admits that it funded gain of function research a the Wuhan lab.

Technically, Fauci did not lie to Congress under oath. He is accurate when he says, " NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

First, "gain of Function" research is common world wide and there is a consortium of public university and private labs that collaborate on this type of work. NIH sent money to EcoHealth Alliance and I suspect this is an NGO. NGO's of this type are responsible for distributing large grants from governments to various entities that are doing all kinds of research. The purpose of gain of function research involving viruses is to accurately predict mutations that might confer increased morbidity or mortality of the virus being looked at. For example, GOF research is ongoing on N1H3 Influenza viruses for this purpose as well as the future design of seasonal vaccines.

In this case, it looks to me like the NIH grant was non-specific regarding which viruses were being explored by doing gain of function experiments although it may have been or parts of the grant were earmarked for SARS and SARS2. It's important to include the terms and conditions of the grant that NIH attached to it in considering what this means.

Second, what should be the central questions regarding the Wuhan lab from which SARS2 is speculated to have originated are (1) Were safety measures and controls to prevent infection of lab workers involved in GOF research sufficient? (2) What steps have been or are being taken to enforce implementation of he already existing safety and control protocols? I see no further utility in finger pointing at individuals or specific labs that might have been involved in routine GOF with the implication that SARS2 was born in and was released from a lab. That's not to say that we need to know how the progenitor SARS became SARS2 but learning about that is more about responsible research not angry finger pointing. The more that kind of approach is utilized, the less cooperation and collaboration in this important research will take place.

I'm no fan of Dr. Fauci for a number of reasons previously discussed here. But, IMO, he didn't commit a crime. I knew about the controversy over this particular grant in the May/June time frame when questions of where the virus originated were headline news. When how I just explained it above surfaced in various news reports, finger pointing at Fauci and the NIH faded.

What this Brietbart article is is nothing more than rehashing the grant and Fauci's involvement in it in a new way. Old news, actually with Fauci's implied nefarious roll in it greatly exaggerated this time around.

[iam416]

LMMFAO. A Trump supporter complaining about lies and then using the race card. Comedy gold.

I see you're back to your normal lying ass self. Good to have your shitposting pack.

[iam416]

Well the Biden administration thinks printing more helicopter money and showering it on the unwashed masses will decrease inflation. They tell us the Afghanistan exit was an amazing success! Progs vilify and defund the police. Then when crime skyrockets, they blame Covid. Biden said he would end the pandemic and the numbers are worse now than when he took office. They say schools don't teach CRT but when people complain about schools teaching CRT, the administration calls them domestic terrorists. Progs literally CRIED over "kids in cages" but apprehensions at the border are at the highest level since 1986. They tell us that empty store shelves and a faltering supply chain are evidence of how great we have it! Everything this administration touches turns to shit. Not only are they completely incompetent, they are also lying pieces of shit.

Trump supporter! LMMFAO! Hahahahahaha.

[Tom W]

Technically, Fauci did not lie to Congress under oath. He is accurate when he says, " NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

...

.

Whether or not Fauci is technically a "criminal" is of little consequence. Even if he is charged, tried, convicted and incarcerated, it will be as a celebrity.


He's too savvy and too well connected for that to happen though. He'll be fine- which is a lot more than we can say for too many people who trusted and believed everything that he told them. .