All things political. Coronavirus Edition. (3 Viewers)

[Maxp]

I fear we are really going to be in a bad place due to the obvious cuts to the federal agencies that deal with infectious disease, but also the negative effect the Affordable Care act has had on non urban hospitals. Our front line defenses are ineffectual and our ability to treat the populous is probably at an all time low. Factor in the cost of healthcare and I can see our system crashing. What do you think about the politics of this virus?

 

[Bigdaddysaints]

The government shouldn't be involved in what people can or can't say on social media unless you want an authoritarian government.

So there should be zero Censorship in this country? Zero? people should be able to say what they want when they want, even if it causes harm to others? I should be able to post threats and bomb threats and the gov't shouldn't be able to tell social media to take it down?
Also, are you 100% against the FCC? Should TV and Radio also have zero Censorship?
So, you also must be against the Trump lawsuit against CNN?

 

[Lapaz]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you are okay with the federal government being involved with censoring or removing US citizens social media post. I think your reasoning is a specious and a huge reach, but it's good to know where you stand.

I don't support government censorship, but I'm okay with the government urging responsibility.

 

[SaintForLife]

Except, as we‘ve been pointing out what you are posting doesn’t prove that the administration was pressuring anyone. Your sources are twisting facts to make it look like something was there that wasn’t. Like making it seem that the government had orchestrated periodic meetings in order to apply pressure to FB when the truth is that FB sought those meetings in order to get help with the disinformation. What you are posting is some pretty wild speculation that pressure occurred. It’s obviously speculation. I have no idea why you cannot see that.

I don’t post people‘s thoughts because of who they are, I post them when they say something interesting and cogent. I don’t know why you would refer back to the time you objected to Tom Nichols as a “grifter” lol. That was embarrassing for you. You posted no evidence of his “grift” and the only thing you could point to was that his opinions on a subject have evolved over the years.

I am not sure you know what proof of anything is anymore.

I could have a signed statement from the Biden administration saying they pressured Twitter or Facebook to ban people and you would still find some way to deny it.

Tom Nichols is an anti Trump grifter. Good for him he's increased his earnings since Trump, but let's not act like he hasn't reversed most of his positions to fit in with his new persona.

You've posted stuff from Andrew Wiseman too. Yah they same guy who twice wiped his government phones of all data while he was on the Mueller team.

I believe you've posted stuff from disgraced Peter Strzok too.


While there is no doubt your 21 years of service to the organization cannot and should not be erased, it is difficult to fathom the repeated, sustained errors of judgment you made while serving as the lead agent in two of the most high profile investigations in the country.

As an organization, we are entrusted to investigate high level public officials regardless of party affiliation. If we ourselves show personal bias or demonstrate a lack of objectivity, that trust can be lost. Our ability to be objective, no matter which party, candidate, or officeholder is in power, must be beyond question. Candidates and office holders will come and go, but the FBI must be steadfast in its resolve to find the truth, regardless of our personal leanings or beliefs. Though the Office of the Inspector General found no evidence of bias impacted any of your or the FBI’s investigative actions or decisions, your sustained pattern of bad judgment in the use of an FBI device has called into question for many of the decisions made during both the Clinton e-mail investigation and the initial states of the Russian Collusion investigation. In short, your repeated selfishness has called into question the credibility of the the entire FBI.

Glass houses and all..

 

[SaintForLife]

So you should not have put disinformation in quotes.

So when an agent propagating disinformation/propaganda (foreign propaganda at that) causes financial loss, deaths, and great burden to our healthcare system across the country, the government should just sit there and allow it to happen?

Did the government force Twitter to ban Berenson? Did the government threaten Twitter like the previous president did? Where you appalled about Trump threatening U.S. businesses?

I was speaking in general about the Biden administration's efforts to censor what they don't want on social media and not Berenson in that post. I should have been more clear.

 

[SaintForLife]

So there should be zero Censorship in this country? Zero? people should be able to say what they want when they want, even if it causes harm to others? I should be able to post threats and bomb threats and the gov't shouldn't be able to tell social media to take it down?
Also, are you 100% against the FCC? Should TV and Radio also have zero Censorship?
So, you also must be against the Trump lawsuit against CNN?

Oh lordy. Removing something because it's illegal isn't censorship.

 

[MT15]

I was speaking in general about the Biden administration's efforts to censor what they don't want on social media and not Berenson in that post. I should have been more clear.

You should put quotes around “the Biden administration’s efforts to censor what they don’t want on social media” since you haven’t offered any proof at all. You just wish it was true and the people you are quoting even admit they are supposing there was pressure.

Just admit it - you will believe anything you read that will discredit Biden.

You never even acknowledged that the guy you quoted was misrepresenting the interaction between the Biden Administration and FB, that cuddle pointed out to you. One would think it would cause someone to rethink their reliance on a person, once that person’s been shown to be misrepresenting the facts in their writings.

And, for the umpteenth time, I am not a fan of people whose opinions I post - and I don’t take their words seriously because of who they are. I post tweets that I find interesting or valuable in some way. And just because people may have done something stupid in the case of Strzok in having an affair and getting caught communicating on his business phone, that doesn’t mean he cannot have some genuine insight about topics he knows well. And as I have said numerous times, I don’t always agree with Tom Nichols, but he is a good follow. He knows what he’s talking about in the case of Russia, he has some really good insights into war and international relations. He is the opposite of a grifter. You continue to demonstrate your ignorance about him.

I don’t have a cartoonish view of people as either all good or all bad. However, if I see someone who is consistently twisting the truth in one direction, and ignoring facts to push narratives, I do write that person off and I block people on Twitter all the time. It almost never fails that the people you quote on Twitter are people I have previously blocked for their lack of truthfulness. Funny that.

 

[Bigdaddysaints]

Oh lordy. Removing something because it's illegal isn't censorship.

The FCC censoring TV isn't taking something down thats illegal.

 

[CoolBrees]

And private companies making their own decisions on what to allow on their sites isn’t censorship either - no matter who advises them.

It’s called market capitalism.

 

[SaintForLife]

And private companies making their own decisions on what to allow on their sites isn’t censorship either - no matter who advises them.

It’s called market capitalism.

When they are censoring things that the government wants censored then it's no longer just simply a private company doing what they want. If the government is involved it's a free speech issue.

 

[MT15]

When they are censoring things that the government wants censored then it's no longer just simply a private company doing what they want. If the government is involved it's a free speech issue.

Hey - good for you. You’re using the word “if”. Because that’s all we have here so far - a big “if”. No proof, just some speculation by people who want it to be true.

 

[Optimus Prime]

Yep, certainly is an unsolvable puzzle

'Were They Hacked?': NBC Mocked for Saying Experts Are 'Puzzling' Over Why COVID Death Rates Higher for Republicans

“Covid deaths are unevenly distributed among Republicans and Democrats, but experts are still puzzling over why these differences exist,” tweeted NBC Politics, part of NBC News, on Thursday, with their article claiming the “reason is up for debate.” Covid deaths are unevenly distributed among...

www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com

 

[Optimus Prime]

Posted in EE also
==============

The guidance from the Florida Health Department came in a terse release at 6:12 on Friday evening, ahead of a three-day weekend:

Joseph A. Ladapo, the state’s top health official, warned young adult men to stop taking coronavirus vaccines by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, citing an “abnormally high risk” of heart-related deaths.

But Ladapo’s recommendation — extrapolated from a short state analysis that has not been peer-reviewed, carries no authors and warns that its findings are “preliminary” and “should be interpreted with caution” — was swiftly condemned by medical and public health leaders, who said the Florida surgeon general’s announcement was politics masquerading as science and could lead Americans to forgo lifesaving interventions.

More than a dozen experts interviewed by The Washington Post — including specialists in vaccines, patient safety and study design — listed concerns with Florida’s analysis, saying it relies on information gleaned from frequently inaccurate death certificates rather than medical records, skews the results by trying to exclude anyone with covid-19 or a covid-related death, and draws conclusions from a total of 20 cardiac-related deaths in men 18 to 39 that occurred within four weeks of vaccination.

Experts noted the deaths might have been caused by other factors, including underlying illnesses or undetected covid……..

“If you submitted that to a peer-reviewed journal, unless you were paying them to publish it, it would get rejected,” added Daniel Salmon, who leads the Institute of Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“Putting out half-baked reports from a department of health is a dangerous thing to do.”

Twitter briefly removed Ladapo’s post touting the study over the weekend, citing it as misinformation, before restoring it hours later; the tweet has since been shared more than 50,000 times, cheered by anti-vaccine advocates and amplified by conservative media highlighting Ladapo’s claim that his state will “not be silent on the truth.”…….

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/10/11/florida-surgeon-general-ladapo-covid-vaccines/

 

[MT15]

As he says, this is good news:

 

[SamAndreas]

As he says, this is good news:

That taken with a bit of news about how almost everyone in Singapore has had their bivalent booster shot.

Those bits of news evaluated together on a time line is suggestive that indeed that bivalent booster shot is effective against the XBB.

And indeed that is good news.

I've had my bivalent booster shot but very few people in my county have. That's not good news.

 

[Optimus Prime]

It turns out that all the bitter back-and-forth between red and blue states about how quickly to reopen schools during the covid-19 pandemic was nothing but political theater, as far as test scores are concerned.

Student performance suffered across the board, and it could take years to make up the ground we’ve lost.


Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), released Monday, show that the pandemic ushered in a falling tide that lowered all boats.

Scores for fourth-graders and eighth-graders in reading declined markedly — and, in math, showed the biggest drop since testing began in 1990 — regardless of what ambitious politicians said or did.


Republican Govs. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas, for example, made a big show of reopening their states’ schools in the fall of 2020, with DeSantis going so far as to threaten to withhold funding from school districts that did not comply.

Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, on the other hand, moved more slowly, conditioning the return to in-person instruction on the level of covid-19 infection in a given county.

But the NAEP report, based on testing this spring, showed that student performance suffered equally despite the different approaches.

Math scores for fourth-graders dropped by four points in California, five points in Florida and five points in Texas. For eighth-graders, scores dropped by six points in California, seven points in Florida and seven points in Texas.


Scores in reading in those three states also moved in lockstep, falling by a point or two.

Political posturing might have mattered to governors who’d like to be president someday, but it made no difference to the millions of children in the nation’s schools.

From the students’ point of view, there was no “right way” to blunt the impact of the pandemic. All strategies, we now know, were equally futile……

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/test-scores-plummet-red-and-blue-states/

 

[Optimus Prime]

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has issued a threat to Anthony Fauci, saying the president’s chief medical adviser and his entire family are going to “suffer” after the midterm elections next month.

“On 8 November, when we destroy the Democratic party as a national political institution and really end the regime, the hunted become the hunters. The whole Fauci family is going to be welcome to the investigations. The entire family,” Mr Bannon said on his War Room podcast on Sunday..........

MSN

www.msn.com

 

[MT15]

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has issued a threat to Anthony Fauci, saying the president’s chief medical adviser and his entire family are going to “suffer” after the midterm elections next month.

“On 8 November, when we destroy the Democratic party as a national political institution and really end the regime, the hunted become the hunters. The whole Fauci family is going to be welcome to the investigations. The entire family,” Mr Bannon said on his War Room podcast on Sunday..........

MSN

www.msn.com

Bannon is giving off Alex Jones vibes. What a Peice of work.

 

[CoolBrees]

Aw. Snowflake seems stressed. I guess upcoming jail time will do that to you,

Hopefully he gets Epstein’s old cell mate.