Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[Ghengis Jon]

Also, while the Chinese are willfully ignorned CO2 emissions, the United States is willfully refusing to mine rare earth metals: https://www.nationalreview.com/corne...are-after-all/

Rare earth metals are a leverage point for the Chinese. The US is sitting on a fuckton of them if we can ever start to mine them.

That's off base. China has the world's largest reserves of rare earth metals at 44M metric tons. Also the largest seller at 120,000 MT in 2018. The US is 7th on the list with 1.5M metric tons in reserves. The US has a single domestic source for REM because its cheaper to buy them from China, Viet Nam or Brazil. I'm surprised the Chinese haven't hammered us with that card. Yet.

[CGVT]

The censorship continues. The latest Conservative to get banned from youtube for "racist" or "hate" speech is Stefan Monlyneaux.

Good.

[Jeff Buchanan]

What's new in COVID Land? Well, only 16 states have an R(t) less than zero and fucking NY is not one of them. Ha. 16!!! Yep, reopening.

In my local S. FL paper, there was a very good re-visited article that originally appeared in the Seattle Times - the ten pound Sunday edition (I found the original and the link is below). It explains the numbers with some graphics. It's basic. If you've been posting and following COVID here, it's first grade and you're probably in HS on COVID. It's nicely presented though...... everyone following COVID should understand the basics given the reams of data that is flooding your senses.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle...-is-spreading/

I offered this morning what's behind one man's anti-mask thinking. The guy is not an idiot. He tends to be very well informed when he states a position on something. He's a big-time conservative but doesn't like Trump. I present these credentials, IOW, he's worth being listened to. He suggests a different approach to managing this thing: Take basic infection control steps seriously. If you get sick because you failed to do that, mask. If you are vulnerable mask. If neither of these apply, no need to mask. Fully open the economy. I'm not ready to endorse this approach. I'm looking at it.

I haven't seen anyone publicly arguing for a different approach, other than shutting shit down, to managing the high rate of SARS-CoV-2 transmission attendant to reopenings. That's real. No getting around it and the scary GRs occurring almost everywhere or will happen everywhere in the US in the coming months.

There are definite counter-current narrative mumblings going on about younger people getting infected, most of them asymptomatic when they are tested, no real crisis in hospital bed space, better care, shorter hospital stays for C-19 patients actually admitted, no increasing death rates (yet), all of that..... and contrasted with an economy screaming for more openings and less closings. And, if you go back to very early in this fight, experts were saying masking may be unnecessary. Now, if you are an official, talking like that will get you daggers from every quarter.

I don't think any of this - I'll call it a realty check - will prompt a very public shift in how PH officials depict C-19 or elected officials, particularly Governors and Mayors, manage reopening. OTH, I have this gut feeling, let's call it what it probably is, wishful thinking, that we are going to see changes in the way we will face this thing going forward, mostly for the good. Still a bit of optics management to sooth doubters and hand wringers will persist but much less shutting down and more opening.

TBH, the facts depict the virus as one bad mother-fucker - it's unique and I just finished reading a terrific article on it in Scientific American (I got a link from an MD friend that subscribes so, not sure I can link it) that reflects what is known about it through June 15th and how drugs and vaccines might work against it. Cliff notes:

• It has more AGCT arrangements, like almost 2X as many, in it's genome than any other previously studied virus
• That allows it to adapt to the host immune system's normal response to infection and avoid being eradicated. Instead it thrives.
• It reproduces very quickly, killing the human cells it invades in the process. How rapidly it commandeers the human host's lung cells and reproduces is unique.
• However, patient's don't develop symptoms quickly allowing an infected person to become highly infectious and to unknowingly infect others. This is unique to SARS-CoV-2.
• In the worst cases, the immune system goes into overdrive (cytokine storm - primarily a blood vessel inflammatory reaction) and kills the patient.
• In some cases (actually a lot more than current thinking has it), the virus does nothing and dies out. The wide range of symptomatlogy is also unique.
• Anti-viral drug research intended to target how the virus reproduces or manages cytokine storm is robust, ongoing and will produce effective drugs within months. e.g., Remdisivir.
• There are 6 vaccine approaches. One or more of them is going to prove to be initially effective in eliminating the virus (best case) or making symptoms much less severe.

If your interested and have an hour or so, here's a link - it may or may not be pay-walled:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...2-coronavirus/

[AlabamAlum]

Hey y’all, the Bama-Michigan Citrus Bowl is on the EspnU. The Wolverines are up 13-7 in the 2nd. Things look dire for the Tide.

[Hannibal]

Good.

Give CGVT credit — at least he doesn’t try to hide the fact that he gets irreparably butthurt by opposing views and is incapable of engaging with them intelligently. Especially when they are logic/fact-based. Having those viewpoints silenced and living in his alternate reality is much easier.

[CGVT]

Why should a private company have to give a platform to those assholes?

Good for Facebook. Just because a Nazi is on his soapbox on street corner doesn't mean that anyone has to film and broadcast it.

Fuck those fucking fucks

[Hannibal]

Give CGVT credit — at least he doesn’t try to hide the fact that he gets irreparably butthurt by opposing views and is incapable of engaging with them intelligently. Especially when they are logic/fact-based. Having those viewpoints silenced and living in his alternate reality is much easier.

[CGVT]

Engage intelligently with them. Ha!

Jesus man, we fought two wars to stop their ridiculous ideology

YouTube bans white supremacist channels including those of Richard Spencer, David Duke, and Stefan Molyneux



https://www.businessinsider.com/yout...spencer-2020-6

[Dr. Strangelove]

What's new in COVID Land? Well, only 16 states have an R(t) less than zero and fucking NY is not one of them. Ha. 16!!! Yep, reopening.

I offered this morning what's behind one man's anti-mask thinking. The guy is not an idiot. He tends to be very well informed when he states a position on something. He's a big-time conservative but doesn't like Trump. I present these credentials, IOW, he's worth being listened to. He suggests a different approach to managing this thing: Take basic infection control steps seriously. If you get sick because you failed to do that, mask. If you are vulnerable mask. If neither of these apply, no need to mask. Fully open the economy. I'm not ready to endorse this approach. I'm looking at it.

Wearing a mask requires such minimal effort that I don't get why anyone would choose to fight and fight and fight it. Are your constitutional rights being violated? No. No more than you being asked to wear your pants in public or not walk into Applebee's with no shoes on. I thought we had established that the masks do much more to prevent people from spreading it than prevent you from catching it. So to say you should only wear a mask if you're a high risk individual, well, no. The point is that plenty of people are spreading it without ever realizing that they're contagious. Even if the masks only cut down on 50% of the spread that's significant.

[CGVT]

Hannibal with his friends exercising his right to free speech.

White, proud and superior jeans...

i7839jjuzlx41.png

[Hannibal]

Wearing a mask damages social interactions. It's a bigger problem for me than the slight discomfort of it. I returned to the office today and it was surreal. Half empty with everyone wearing a mask. People keeping to themselves mostly instead of congregating or communicating in person. A necessary evil, perhaps, but it's not without cost.

[AlabamAlum]

I don’t know any of them. YouTube can suspend whomever they want, though. I disagree with the censorship, but they can ban whomever they want on their site.

[Hannibal]

I don’t know any of them. YouTube can suspend whomever they want, though. I disagree with the censorship, but they can ban whomever they want on their site.

youtube is free to censor whomever they want, but you aren't free to refuse employment to a severely mentally ill man who wears a wig and a dress and calls himself a "woman". You aren't free to do hardly anything anymore. There are a billion restrictions on what private business owners are allowed to do. The overwhelming majority of which of which address behavior that is far less dangerous than a powerful monopoly censoring political speech in an effort to manufacture consensus and keep people from becoming informed. Even the robber barons couldn't do that.

Welcome to Clownworld 2020.

[Dr. Strangelove]

youtube is free to censor whomever they want, but you aren't free to refuse employment to a severely mentally ill man who wears a wig and a dress and calls himself a "woman". There are a billion restrictions on what private business owners are allowed to do. The overwhelming majority of which of which address behavior that is far less dangerous than censoring political speech in an effort to manufacture consensus and keep people from becoming informed.

Welcome to Clownworld 2020.

YouTube has different legal obligations as an employer versus their obligations as a so-called publisher or platform provider. So yeah, just because YouTube is not allowed to discriminate on the basis of race in choosing employees, is does not then follow that YouTube has some sort of comparable ethical or moral obligation to hand a megaphone to anyone who wants it.

People like David Duke and Richard Spencer aren't interested in 'civilized debate' anyways. They want to "provoke" and the tinfoil brigade knows it is nothing without a bunch of mainstream liberals to "provoke" tears from. Just look at what's happened to Milo or that psycho Laura Loomer since getting de-platformed. They have zero life skills outside of being amateur conservative shock jocks and are now begging for pennies on Gab or Parler. And most of the rest of the Alt Right and Trumpworld social media 'superstars" are the same.

[Dr. Strangelove]

Now the Arizona Gov orders bars, nightclubs, gyms, theaters, and water parks closed for 30 days.