The Frankish Reich

And nothing said about the tweet that started all this? The one that sought to blame strange dark people for a measles outbreak more directly attributable to strange white people?

Take a moment away from cheerleading for right wing populism and actually read AFD's manifesto. https://www.afd.de/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/2017-04-12_afd-grundsatzprogramm-englisch_web.pdf Lots of fun stuff there like a Universal Basic Income. It's a weird mix of Donald Trump and AOC.

And still ... no substantive response about how all those Indians are bringing measles from halfway around the globe and the homegrown Mennonites are pure as their white skin.

Team names are stupid. There is none stupider than Buffalo Bills, but we're used to it so it sound o.k. to us. I'd rather have a world in which it was like the English Premier League, but even that has some with nicknames and some without, which may be the weirdest thing of all.

Hah! Beat you to it. Maybe you will come to understand that Mennonites are rural folk. You don't find them in NYC except in that Harrison Ford movie.

I stand corrected. Manitoba appears to have the highest percentage of Mennonites. You be you, our dear schoolmarm.

A little project for a bored elder statesman like you: Do an overlay map. Mennonites per capita on one, then measles rates on the other. Report back. thank you. [Mennonites is weird]

I say we bring back the New York Black Yankees name. (Yes, that was a ***** League team) EDIT: the auto censor is weird. N[e]gro League is not ok?

Going to school is dangerous because: you must get to school. Buses crash. Kids get hit by passing cars. They pick up measles from the Mennonite at the next desk (joke!!). They fall off monkey bars. Staying home all the time is no doubt safer. No denying that. That's what I mean. We must always accept some risk if we are not going to be Howard Hughes. Everyone on the anti-Covid vaxx requirement side focuses on the risks associated with getting it, and not on the risks associated with no one getting it.

As the MAGAs would say ... that's what you get when you make a barren woman the Attorney General. No empathy for kids.

I agree. That story just never made sense to me. Do I think, based purely on circumstantial evidence, that Trump and Clinton and Dershowitz had "sexual relations" (broadly defined, not the Clinton definition) with Epstein girls, who may or may not have been underage? Yes, yes, and definitely yes.

Are we sure he's not getting money from the RNC? Nothing they'd like better than the return of Hunter to public life.

Only a damn fool wouldn't read on to note that some of those "Mexicans" are ... MENNONITES! They send out new colonies all over the place. South America. Canada. Texas. Africa. Of course measles is endemic in other places. The point is that the Texas/NM outbreak and most of the Canadian cases are traceable to Mennonite outbreaks first, because those communities have abysmal vaccination rates. Sorry to burst your bubble. White people, including white immigrants: they can spread disease too. Who knew? It's about calling out stupid racist/anti-immigrant tweets that are re-posted here with no concern whatsoever for whether they're true. (I know you didn't post it, but please don't feel compelled to defend it)

OK. Be a pedantic creep. Just odd. "The most Mennonites per capita." Now go find support for the dumbass tweet that talks about Indian immigrants.

Alberta and western Ontario. But given the populations of the respective provinces, Alberta's rate is much, much higher. Look at the link. No, white people are not inherently more hygienic. Or look here: https://macleans.ca/society/behind-the-scenes-of-ontarios-mennonite-measles-outbreak/

Just the kind of mature, measured response I expected.

No, I won't, because that would be stupid. How about we look at Canada by province? That's at least sensible. https://health-infobase.canada.ca/measles-rubella/ Per Capita, Alberta is winning. And that's where you will find most Mennonites. Yes, it would make sense to screen/vaccinate people from any place where measles is endemic. But Alberta is, unfortunately, already one of those places. By the way, I just took my first Amtrak trip (at a rather advanced age) and I was really amazed by how many Mennonites/Amish take Amtrak out of Chicago. I had thought trains were not allowed. But it turns out they kind of are allowed.

Where there are Mennonites there is measles. What's so hard to understand? You sound frustrated that you have to blame white Christians and the anti-vaxxers.

Why do you assume they're ignorant? They know damn well that their product is not the economic engine that the (M)NBA is. I'm sure they also know that the NBA essentially subsidizes their league. They also seem to know that a "fairness" play is more likely to succeed than some kind of hard economics play like profit sharing, since there isn't much if any profit to share.

Yes. Yes it does. And now try this one: on the Opinion side of the NYT, Ross Douthut - their resident "conservative," although in a Paul Ryan kind of way (but certainly no TDS guy) - interview the Miami Herald (NOTE: Mainstream Media!) reporter who got the ball rolling on the whole Jeffrey Epstein thing way back when. A really interesting read. It may be available as a podcast too (sometimes those aren't firewalled). Here's some food for thought (excuse the TIkTok link; I know a lot of our readers really like pictures): Here's the full story: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/19/opinion/interesting-times-julie-k-brown-epstein.html Here's the part about how/why Epstein got such a sweetheart deal from the Miami prosecution in 2008: Brown: Well, I found out that Jeffrey Epstein, of course, had a lot of resources, both financially and politically. He cultivated people on both sides of the political aisle — and people across the world, really. He was very wealthy, but there was no real indicator of how he made his wealth. I just learned that he was able to hire essentially a dream team: Kenneth Starr, Alan Dershowitz, Jay Lefkowitz. A lot of these had contacts with the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis. Douthat: This is a very prominent law firm. Brown: And Epstein was very shrewd. Every lawyer that he hired had a tie to one of the prosecutors on the case. Alex Acosta had worked for Kirkland & Ellis. And he was very ambitious at the time. He really was a rising star in the G.O.P. Ironically, one of the ways that he was rising was he was handling a lot of child pornography cases. He was part of a team of prosecutors that was prosecuting child porn. So Epstein knew exactly who to hire. I mean, he even hired a lawyer that had dated one of the prosecutors. So every single lawyer had a tie to the prosecutors in some way and was sort of — if you’re a prosecutor, you want to eventually end up somewhere in a good law firm and make more money. So some of these prosecutors were star struck by some of these lawyers like Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz. Douthat: So in that sense it looks like insiders and power create a kind of path of least resistance for the prosecution where you get some kind of conviction. You don’t have to end up at war with this legal all-star team spending all kinds of resources.

I liked Fant when the Broncos drafted him. But he started with a dysfunctional offense, and now that time has passed his advantages - speed/athleticism - have likely declined while he doesn't appear to have improved in other (blocking) ways. In some alternative universe he would've been a real weapon; the wormhole to that universe is now closed.

Find me a reputable study that shows that the overall costs to society of the COVID vaccination program exceeded its benefits. Hint: there isn't one. So we are left with people arguing that COVID vaccines do have some costs, and do cause side effects in some people. Like we didn't already know that with respect to all vaccines since the concept of a "vaccine" was invented. And look back to my opening post. I didn't say we needed to mandate vaccines for pre-HS kids. Life is dangerous. Going to school - something the government has always mandated, at least in the pre-"home school" folly days - is dangerous. The COVID vaccine mitigated the dangers of COVID. Period.

Not surprising. Talk about something else other than the solid reporting done by the NYT on Boelter.

Just asking questions. That's what you want to say now that the tables are turned. Just asking questions.

The non-hate take of the mainstream media. And it's a good and fair read. Find a non-gated version and read it! Then discuss how the hot takes of the alt Twittersphere compare .... Short story: a man ruined by religious zealotry. Not a condemnation of religion; a condemnation of zealots.