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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17742
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Fri Mar 25, 2022 10:12 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Germany avoided the worst of the early pandemic, but is skyrocketing now. The good news is that only 0.1% of the cases are serious. Vaccination rates are very high. I have to ask the paranoid boys, why vaccination seems to be saving lives?
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isobars



Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935

PostPosted: Fri Mar 25, 2022 5:47 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

techno900 wrote:
The best candidate should be selected no matter their race or gender...

but the left doesn't understand that. EVERYTHING is about race, gender, and/or ancestry for them. The fact that most, maybe all, presidents in my lifetime promised to appoint a woman and/or black doesn't make it OK. It's still pandering, it's sexist and/or racist, and it's wrong, for the reason you cite above and because it overtly encourages divisiveness.

Worse yet in the short term is its risk of putting a disaster in a position degrading our image around the world. Can you imagine how the world, from Putin to Xi to the EU to Iran, would react if a self-proven outright nincompoop were next in line behind a physically and mentally feeble POTUS solely because of her skin color and genitalia? Putin would invade Ukraine, Xi would be drooling over Taiwan, Iran would rapidly acquire nuclear ICBMs, our own borders would be eradicated, and intelligent world leaders would be crapping their pants and referring to them as Bumbles and Chuckles.

Fortunately, that's not likely to happen in a nation as well-informed as the U.S. Only a turd-wurld country the size and intellect of Bartovia could be so dumb. Even if that COULD happen here, we at least have a third-in-line, genitalia-qualified, backup mental giant to save us from complete idiocy.

(I had a great, clean caricature of her to post here, but iW or the whole internet has censored it. That should scare the crap out of every American.)
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swchandler



Joined: 08 Nov 1993
Posts: 10588

PostPosted: Fri Mar 25, 2022 7:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

isobars can't help but show what an absolute zero that he is in the ugliest way. There is nobody here that broadcasts such rabid hate with no sense of conscience at all.

Yet, he's the kind of worthless scum that worships an unfit dishonest con man like Donald Trump. Frankly, it's a real bummer to have miserable low-life losers like him living here in America.
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17742
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Fri Apr 15, 2022 1:23 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Interesting article, both about the unhinged violence of the loony right, and the deaths that they have caused.

Quote:
BY MICHAEL HILTZIKBUSINESS COLUMNIST
APRIL 6, 2022 1:44 PM PT
Last December, we reported on the threatening behavior of a group of anti-vaccine activists toward Kristina Lawson, the president of the Medical Board of California.

As Lawson recounted then, they surveilled her house, watched her children leave for school, then physically intimidated her at the garage of her business office.

That was all because she headed an agency tasked with keeping doctors from spreading misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic.

I can’t even begin to quantify the tweets, DMs, emails, etc along the lines of ‘see you at Nuremberg 2.0.’

— Virologist Angela Rasmussen

Now the group, which calls itself America’s Frontline Doctors, has stepped up its campaign against Lawson.

The group has released a 21-minute video that depicts Lawson in Nazi regalia, a whip in her hand and swastika on her shoulder, and shows a clip of the garage confrontation validating Lawson’s description.

The video implies that Lawson is comparable to dictators such as Stalin and Hitler, and describes her as the “primary suspect” in the “crime of hunting doctors who are on the front lines of critical care and scientific study.”

As she did in December, Lawson called out her accusers. “It is disturbing to be targeted by anti-science zealots and the people they seek to manipulate,” she said through a spokesman on Friday.

Since the video’s release a few days earlier, she said, “I have received a constant stream of emails and voicemail messages threatening me and demanding I resign from my position. As I shared previously, I will continue to do this work even when it is hard, and notwithstanding that there is an organized effort to scare me and other dedicated public servants away from it.”

It was evident even months ago that attacks on public officials who had advocated strong anti-pandemic measures were becoming more frequent and more extreme. Since then, the attacks have become even more threatening, their imagery and rhetoric more violent.

FILE - In this June 9, 2020 file photo, Sweden's State epidemiologist Anders Tegnell of the Public Health Agency of Sweden speaks during a news conference, in Stockholm, Sweden. Swedish health authorities on Wednesday, Oct. 6, 2021, suspended the use of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine for those ages 30 and under, saying the move was done out of precaution. Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s chief epidemiologist, said they “follow the situation closely and act quickly to ensure that vaccinations against COVID-19 are always as safe as possible and at the same time provide effective protection" against the disease. (Fredrik Sandberg / TT via AP)

Column: Did Sweden beat the pandemic by refusing to lock down? No, its record is disastrous

There’s talk of retribution for the offense of having advocated public health measures such as closing retails shops, restaurants, bars and schools. Consider this March 11 tweet by Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya, a signatory to the Great Barrington Declaration, a document that promoted herd immunity against the pandemic rather than lockdowns.

A “coalition of regular people,” Bhattacharya wrote, “will hold accountable the people who pushed the lockdowns to answer for the destruction they caused.”

I asked Bhattacharya to explain the nature of the accountability he thought would be appropriate, and for his reaction to the violent or retributive imagery being mustered against advocates of stringent anti-pandemic measures. He replied that he deplored “the abuse that scientists and doctors have faced for working on COVID, whatever their point of view. Accountability is not a synonym for violence.”

At the Brownstone Institute, an offshoot of the Great Barrington Declaration project, an anti-lockdown post in December by institute founder and president Jeffrey A. Tucker was headlined “Who Will Be Held Responsible for This Devastation?” and illustrated with a picture of a guillotine. I asked Tucker to comment, but received no reply.

Anti-lockdown crusaders have made common cause with the anti-vaccine lobby, campaigning not only against social distancing measures but also vaccine mandates, and calling for public trials of vaccine and social distancing advocates.

Often they invoke the Nuremberg Trials of the 1940s, equating public health officials with the Nazi officials tried for war crimes after World War II, many of whom were sentenced to death.

“I can’t even begin to quantify the tweets, DMs, emails, etc along the lines of ‘see you at Nuremberg 2.0'—typically due to my advocacy for vaccines/NPIs or SARS-CoV-2 origins work,” virologist Angela Rasmussen, who has researched the origins of the COVID-19 virus, or SARS-CoV-2, tweeted last month. (“NPIs” are “nonpharmaceutical interventions” such as social distancing.)

Last year, a group of GOP legislators in Maine called for the death penalty for Gov. Janet Mills after she announced a vaccine mandate for healthcare workers. One legislator compared Mills to Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz doctor who was responsible for the deaths of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people.

“These were crimes against humanity,” the lawmaker said. “And what came out of that? The Nuremberg Code. The Nuremberg Trial. Informed consent is at the top and violating that is punishable by death.”

Overheated accusations of criminality are rampant in discussions of COVID-19 policy. On Amazon, one can buy a T-shirt reading “Arrest Fauci.” That’s a reference to Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a top healthcare advisor to the Biden administration, who has been accused of lying to Congress about virus research funded by the institute. The accusation is false.

In a majestically uninformed rant against masking rules and vaccine mandates on the HBO talk show “Real Time With Bill Maher” in January, right-wing pundit Bari Weiss declared that “this is going to be remembered by the younger generation as a catastrophic moral crime.”

The notion underlying this fanatical rhetoric is that the lockdowns that were imposed in the first few months of the pandemic, and that continued in many schools through the 2020-2021 academic years, were treatments worse than the disease. A corollary is that “natural immunity” — a common misnomer for what should more accurately be termed “post-infection immunity” —is a reliable path to the herd immunity that would protect the population at large from the disease.

The argument of the herd immunity advocates, including the Great Barrington signatories, is that society would be much better off if we took stringent steps to protect the most vulnerable individuals, such as seniors and those with other medical weaknesses, from COVID-19 while allowing the infection to rip through the rest of the population. The Great Barrington Declaration labeled this as “focused protection.”

The idea was that younger and healthier people, especially children, could acquire immunity by catching the disease but bore little risk of dangerous consequences. This was the core contention of those who opposed school shutdowns.

There are quite a few problems with this approach. One is that in practical terms it’s impossible to wall off the vulnerable population from the rest of society. As epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz noted, relocating everyone over 60 who was living in a multigenerational household into specialized housing to protect them is such a massive task “it’s hard to see how this could ever have been achieved.”

Another is that while younger people and children are generally less likely to land in the hospital or die from COVID-19, they’re not immune. During the pandemic, 1,100 children 18 and younger have died from COVID-19 in the U.S., at least partially because of the assumption that they were relatively safe. If they had been deliberately exposed as subjects of policy, the toll would have been higher.

There is no evidence that a let-it-rip approach is anything like a foolproof path to herd immunity, or that it has produced a healthier outcome in communities that were purposefully lax about social distancing and mask wearing.

A recent report on the experience of Sweden, which was soft about anti-pandemic measures in the expectation that it would rapidly reach herd immunity, documented the folly of its approach.

Sweden’s death rate from COVID-19 was better than that in the U.S., Britain, and some other countries, but worse than the rate in Germany, Canada and Japan and much worse than its Nordic neighbors Denmark, Finland and Norway. If Sweden had Norway’s death rate, it would have suffered 4,429 deaths from COVID-19, instead of more than 18,500.

The same phenomenon can be seen in the U.S. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the COVID-19 death rate in Florida, which has boasted about remaining wide open during the pandemic, has reached 341 per 100,000 people. In California, where major population centers imposed much stricter social distancing measures, the rate is 223 per 100,000.

To put this in perspective, if California had Florida’s death rate, it would have experienced about 48,200 more deaths than the 88,200 on record. If Florida had California’s rate, it would have suffered 25,600 fewer deaths than the 73,400 recorded.


It’s true that Florida has a higher percentage of residents 65 and older than California. But it’s also true that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis bragged about taking special measures to protect its seniors. Obviously his Great Barrington-esque approach has failed miserably.

The major problem with the herd immunity approach is that it has become clear that the only path to a normal post-pandemic society is through vaccination. Yet the anti-lockdown crowd is also anti-vaccine. When those options are eliminated, all that remains in its arsenal is conspiracy-mongering, which the Frontline group offers enthusiastically amid its pseudoscientific claptrap and wild accusations of criminality.

Fauci, Walensky, Lawson and Biden are “not leaders, but leeches,” its video says, “bleeding our nation into fatal submission” to put billions of dollars into the pockets of vaccine companies such as Pfizer.

One of the speakers at that rally was Dr. Joseph Ladapo, a hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin promoter who has questioned the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines — and who DeSantis appointed last year as the state surgeon general.

Since the video accuses Lawson of committing a crime, it’s proper to note that Simone Gold, a California-licensed doctor who founded the frontline organization and plays a starring role in the video, pleaded guilty on March 3 to a federal criminal count for joining the mob that stormed into the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

She is scheduled for sentencing on her misdemeanor plea June 16, when she will face up to a year in jail.

Although Lawson is the prime target of the video, it also attacks CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, Fauci and President Biden (Biden is called “Brandon,” a schoolyard taunt beloved of the far right). Walensky and Fauci are caricatured in an animation as slavering ghouls.

The video promotes hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, an anti-parasitic medicine, as treatments for COVID-19, even though both have been shown by medical trials to be useless against the disease.

Among the charges the video makes against Lawson is that the California Medical Board endorsed vaccinating pregnant women against COVID-19. In reality, that advisory reflected advice from the CDC and the California Department of Public Health that the vaccine is safe for pregnant women.

The video cites a June 17, 2021, paper in the New England Journal of Medicine that it says points to an elevated risk of spontaneous abortions, or miscarriages, among vaccinated women. In fact, the paper found no difference in “adverse pregnancy and neonatal outcomes in persons vaccinated against Covid-19" compared with rates prior to the pandemic.

A subsequent paper found no elevated risk of spontaneous abortions after vaccination, adding to “the accumulating evidence about the safety of mRNA COVID-19 vaccination in pregnancy,” according to the authors. (The mRNA vaccines are those made by Pfizer and Moderna.)

As we observed in December, it’s hard to understand why the Frontline Doctors organization has focused on Lawson, who leads one of 70 medical and osteopathic boards in the U.S., unless it’s because the California board has disciplinary power over Gold and Christopher Rake, a California-licensed physician who stars in the video.

Many of those state boards have signaled agreement with a warning issued last year by the Federation of State Medical Boards that “physicians who generate and spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation or disinformation are risking disciplinary action by state medical boards, including the suspension or revocation of their medical license.”

Plainly, the basic goal of the crusaders against vaccines and other anti-pandemic measures is intimidation. Their claims to have a better approach are based on misinformation, misrepresentation and ideology, so what else do they have?have resulted.
[/quote]
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coachg



Joined: 10 Sep 2000
Posts: 3549

PostPosted: Fri Apr 15, 2022 2:44 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

isobars wrote:
solely because of her skin color and genitalia?


You didn't have a problem with that policy for the first two centuries of this country when the requirements were white males only; now suddenly you have a problem. The word that is stuck in your uvula is hypocrite.

isobars wrote:
(I had a great, clean caricature of her to post here, but iW or the whole internet has censored it. That should scare the crap out of every American.)


Why should this scare the crap out of every American? Wouldn't most Americans actually read the terms of service for any web forum or social media platform they sign up for? And if there are terms that you don't agree with wouldn't someone with common sense find a forum with terms that were acceptable to them?

Coachg
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isobars



Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935

PostPosted: Fri Apr 15, 2022 6:02 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

coachg wrote:
isobars wrote:
solely because of her skin color and genitalia?


You didn't have a problem with that policy for the first two centuries of this country when the requirements were white males only; now suddenly you have a problem. The word that is stuck in your uvula is hypocrite.

isobars wrote:
(I had a great, clean caricature of her to post here, but iW or the whole internet has censored it. That should scare the crap out of every American.)


Why should this scare the crap out of every American? Wouldn't most Americans actually read the terms of service for any web forum or social media platform they sign up for? And if there are terms that you don't agree with wouldn't someone with common sense find a forum with terms that were acceptable to them?

Coachg

I've spoken out against -- and avoided personal -- racism and bigotry all my life. Just one of many examples is my choice and frequent declaration of the greatest hero I'm aware of in my life is Martin Luther King, Jr.

If government-initiated censorship of free speech doesn't bother you, you are a danger to democracy.

The main hypocrite I see here is the one whose primary source of income during his career was taxpayer dollars as a government contractor yet who lambastes retired military for accepting compensation for serving their country. (All military compensation is clearly and thoroughly defined and uniformly administered by design. Busting one's chops about compensation is busting all military's chops.)

I didn't sign up for a moderated forum and sure as hell didn't vote for a government that censors caricatures based on their political affiliation. On what planet is a sketch of an angry DEMOCRAT VP censored but a sketch of the bloody head of a Republican POTUS is allowed? THAT degree of discrimination demonstrates how biased your media and your knowledge of world events are.

http://alexis.lindaikejisblog.com/photos/shares/597c5adce9f50.JPG
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17742
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Fri Apr 15, 2022 6:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

It is sad that someone who sees himself as a protector of the constitution seems to not understand the Bill of Rights. I’ll refresh his foggy mind.

Quote:
First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.


It forbids Congress. Not iwindsurf, Fox, or CNN.
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swchandler



Joined: 08 Nov 1993
Posts: 10588

PostPosted: Fri Apr 15, 2022 6:09 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

"The main hypocrite I see here is the one whose primary source of income during his career was taxpayer dollars as a government contractor yet who lambastes retired military for accepting compensation for serving their country."


Given the comment above, I think that isobars has been injured badly in his imaginary world.
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vientomas



Joined: 25 Apr 2000
Posts: 2343

PostPosted: Fri Apr 15, 2022 6:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

isobars wrote:
coachg wrote:
isobars wrote:
solely because of her skin color and genitalia?


You didn't have a problem with that policy for the first two centuries of this country when the requirements were white males only; now suddenly you have a problem. The word that is stuck in your uvula is hypocrite.

isobars wrote:
(I had a great, clean caricature of her to post here, but iW or the whole internet has censored it. That should scare the crap out of every American.)


Why should this scare the crap out of every American? Wouldn't most Americans actually read the terms of service for any web forum or social media platform they sign up for? And if there are terms that you don't agree with wouldn't someone with common sense find a forum with terms that were acceptable to them?

Coachg

I've spoken out against -- and avoided personal -- racism and bigotry all my life. Just one of many examples is my choice and frequent declaration of the greatest hero I'm aware of in my life is Martin Luther King, Jr.

If government-initiated censorship of free speech doesn't bother you, you are a danger to democracy.

The main hypocrite I see here is the one whose primary source of income during his career was taxpayer dollars as a government contractor yet who lambastes retired military for accepting compensation for serving their country. (All military compensation is clearly and thoroughly defined and uniformly administered by design. Busting one's chops about compensation is busting all military's chops.)

I didn't sign up for a moderated forum and sure as hell didn't vote for a government that censors caricatures based on their political affiliation. On what planet is a sketch of an angry DEMOCRAT VP censored but a sketch of the bloody head of a Republican POTUS is allowed? THAT degree of discrimination demonstrates how biased your media and your knowledge of world events are.

http://alexis.lindaikejisblog.com/photos/shares/597c5adce9f50.JPG


Oh Honey, no. Just no. Will you phuleezzzz read about the 1st and 14th Amendments as they pertain to free speech! It is the government that is prohibited from passing laws restricting speech, subject to certain time, place and manner restrictions. The 1st Amendment DOES NOT prohibit private individuals or entities from censoring speech. Figure it out!!!! LOL
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coachg



Joined: 10 Sep 2000
Posts: 3549

PostPosted: Fri Apr 15, 2022 7:18 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

isobars wrote:
If government-initiated censorship of free speech doesn't bother you, you are a danger to democracy.


Government initiated censorship does bother me. Private company initiated censorship of free speech does not. See the difference?

I don't care that CNN, Fox news, Facebook or Twiter censor free speech; they are private companies and have a right to broadcast what they feel their viewers want to hear or see. I visit someone's house, they lay the ground rules. If I don't like the rules I am free to go to another house or STFU. Crying about free speech violation in their house is not an option.

Coachg
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