Let's start with the "editorial board": The PRC totally hid COVID from the world
Literally the next link they gave me: Richard Petty and Billy Lane have things to say about trade school
And the next link: An Amherst grad thinks legacy admissions are great for diversity
- Well over half the applicants to highly selective colleges could shine equally as students. How, then, do admissions officers decide who gets the golden ring?
Meanwhile in politics, nihilism takes the early lead
- Petri: You know, there’s one thing we know about this group of people: If they bind together, they certainly can stop a candidate that they dislike. Like, there’s one thing this group of people is really efficient at. It’s stopping upstarts with no political experience from taking the nomination. So that bodes really well, I think.
In science and technology, enjoy this extremely pointed dunking on Russia via their space program
- But 1966 was a long time ago. It’s the year Hewlett-Packard developed its first computer. It’s the year Fresca and Twister debuted. Frank Sinatra released “Strangers in the Night,” dooby, dooby, doo. Today’s Russia is trying to replicate an achievement from 1966 — and failing. It speaks volumes about the reckless waste of a once-great nation’s capabilities.
discuss.
I can't for the life of me figure out why people aren't more up in arms about the covid thing. One doesn't need to have a perspective on lab vs. natural to be 100% sure that the CCP screwed the entire world in their response to the early covid signals. The world would respect them a lot more, not less, had they been forthright about the spread, even if they continued to stonewall and obfuscate on its origins. They don't mention it in the piece, but I believe there is a regional treaty in place all over east Asia for novel pneumonia monitoring that was signed in the wake of SARS. It has a reporting system and a bunch of protocols that were just torn to shreds at the first second it was needed. To me, this is grounds for kicking them off the Security Council, ending all sorts of economic coordination, etc. There's almost no punishment too severe, so long as there's a defined path to rehabilitation so that they can be coaxed to behave better next time. And there will be a next time given their cavalier attitude. Not a word from the Biden administration on it, so far as I've heard. I'm sure there are things that go on behind the scenes we'll never be aware of. But the public, not just the American public, deserves way better from our leaders. Good on the Post for highlighting this. I am sensitive to whipping up anti-Chinese sentiment. I 100% do not want that. But this isn't about ethnicity. It's about accountability, and something's gotta give. They can't be just let off scot free.
Because it requires having some insight and understanding into a thing that few people have insight and understanding into. More than that, the "insight and understanding" organization tasked with this is the CDC, and they straight whiffed every decision for like 18 months straight. Science was politicized, everyone could find an expert to point to, and when the truth goes against the consensus everyone shuts the fuck up lest they be given a tinfoil hat. In a free and open society, "the consensus view" is almost always "the true and accurate view." Thus, going against consensus is a lot of fucking work. And at the time, scuttling China was not seen as the sort of thing the world's economies could handle. Yeah so funny story. Once upon a time there were two pariah states. We were big buddies with both of them. Both of them practiced apartheid. Both of them were essential to our military-industrial complex. And both of them got together and tested an atomic bomb. Now here's the thing. The Carter administration knew dead to rights that it was South African uranium - we'd caught them dead to rights enriching them. Not that they really needed it - Israel had smuggled about 200 lbs of uranium out of Pennsylvania by then. And the Carter administration knew dead to rights it was EG&G krytrons smuggled out of the US by Arnon Milchan. We put someone in prison for it. But we had JUST banned any aid whatsoever from going to any nation engaged in nuclear proliferation just a year previously. So the nuke wasn't a nuke. Full stop. Had a cat once. We moved houses and the new house had a lot of trees. Cat was looking out the window and sees a squirrel climb a tree - and he's so excited. Starts making this weird meowing. Definitely wants to be let out. it was snowy and idyllic and picturesque and the squirrel was really cute, up there on the tree and we're all watching it and - WHOOM - big black cat comes ripping out of the bushes and totally misses the squirrel. Squirrel is laughing at the cat from a higher branch. I'm laughing at the cat from the living room not 10 feet away. My sister is laughing. My mother is laughing. Cat's got his ears back. He's not laughing. He never saw another squirrel. From then until the day he died, that cat never saw another squirrel out that window. You could point his head at them and he'd look away.I can't for the life of me figure out why people aren't more up in arms about the covid thing.
I'm sure there are things that go on behind the scenes we'll never be aware of.
It's also becoming obvious that we will all eventually develop pretty serious health problems associated with long covid, provided we don't die from the initial phase of infection anytime soon. And there's basically nothing we can do besides masking, demanding better air filtration, and avoiding crowded indoor spaces. Not that we'll do those things, either, at least not in the near future. But eventually, I think the realization that things are now forever different, public health-wise, becomes a mass disillusionment event. Not sure what happens then, because the wealthy are systematically insulated from the worst of it all, and, I dunno, people might start to get upset about that. I've been very, very disappointed with the Biden admin, the CDC, and yes, of course, the Chinese government. At this point, it's stupidly obvious that Capital/wealth wants Labor to shut the fuck up and get back to work. The way we have structured our society needs to fundamentally change if we're going to solve some of the most pressing problems. We won't change. Not fast enough or without some cataclysmic event(s). I know you love doomerism, b_b, that's why you read all of this
My mom was hospitalized with covid pneumonia as recently as May of this year. And an anti-vaxxer buddy of mine who was in his early 50s with two high school aged kids died from it in late 2021. I mention these not to elicit sympathy, but to highlight that I'm well aware of the damage it has wrought. That said, I'm actually more upbeat about the future than you (haha, big surprise, right?). There are two main reasons I think that covid will fade into the background as time goes on. First, our best recent comparator is the Spanish flu. We think of it as the 1918 flu, but it was actually killing people from 1917 to 1923 (maybe it was 1922...anyway it was a hell of a long time). Eventually it just disappeared. We've seen this movie before. It's an ugly movie to be sure, but eventually the credits roll. Hopefully it won't be six years, but maybe??? The other reason is that the closest scientific comparator we have are the other coronavirus pandemics that have occurred in recorded history. There are at least 2 of the common cold viruses that started as high-death-rate pandemics. The viruses never went away, but either mutated or we just got inured to them or some combination thereof. Again, horror fades to background noise. That's pretty fucking cold comfort for the families of the dead or the people suffering with long term or even permanent lung injuries. In fact it's no kind of comfort. It's just a reminder that no matter how shitty things are, they always get better. This will too. The CDC squandered the best opportunity any has ever had to show how effective government can be when the situation is dire. Their leadership should all be ashamed. Not once in the entire pandemic did I hear an official statement from CDC that said, "This is what we currently believe, but the situation is evolving and we will update you all AND OUR RECOMMENDED POLICIES as facts on the ground change. Bear with us, because we're in the dark and doing our best with limited information." What a shit show. And they'll never be trusted again as long as there is living memory of 2020.
I would argue Russian flu Richard Preston made the case 30 years ago that a successful pathogen is one that increases your participation in its vectors without slowing you down. Evolutionarily speaking, a virus that gives you a runny nose and a cough but doesn't make you skip work is a winner. A virus that kills you and all your friends? Yeah, that's a dead end. And yeah. The CDC is now FEMA but worse. All the hand sanitizer. All the clorox wipes. All the bullshit. One of the cook groups was literally giving away four truckloads of hand sanitizer to anyone who would haul it off because of course they were. Imagine what the past 4 years would have been like with an actual pandemic response team in place.First, our best recent comparator is the Spanish flu.
Totally agree, but I specifically didn’t mention the Russian flu, because it is highly suspected that the Russian flu was actually a Corona virus that may now live on as a cause of the cold. I went Spanish flu because it’s more recent and we know beyond doubt that it was a flu, so it was a good compare/contrast case in my mind. Flu pandemics shaped the initial covid response and lo and behold, we basically wiped out flu in the winter of 2020-2021. Sadly, we weren’t dealing with a droplet but an aerosol transmission, so standing 6 ft apart does fuckall if you’re sharing air. The data were there is February and March, but the CDC had made their choices and there was no trove of data that we’re going to convince them to follow the evidence.