The Frankish Reich

Well Chef Jim is all about retirement on here, so is Medicare not public money?

It matters to me because you are not signing a waiver that says "if I ever get a severe case of COVID, do not expend any public monies on me."

Read this thread - it makes a lot of sense to me.

Assuming is a lot of what goes on here. Was it you (or was it one of your fellow travelers) who just got through suggesting I'm busy hand-wringing, mask-wearing even when not required? Because I'm neither of the above. I want you - all of you - to get vaccinated. That's been proven effective. Masks? Not even close. At best we can say "probably a good idea in certain situations." And I believe those situations are very limited.

Agreed. And I think Mac will be exposed as perfect passing conditions become rare in December and January (assuming they don't draw all dome/warm weather playoff locations). But ... when you can run for 222 yards without even pretending to try to pass, well, then I can't argue with your strategy.

I pointed this out after the game - 1974, Jets at Bills. Joe Ferguson - nobody ever accused him of having a noodle arm - threw 2 passes. (He actually threw 4 - the first two were picked off but negated by penalties. After that, Lou Saban decided that trying to throw the ball at all was stupid.) The Bills won in the rain and wind. Joe Namath's coach wasn't afraid of him throwing the ball. He threw 3 INTs. You play to win the game. https://touchdownwire.usatoday.com/2021/12/07/patriots-three-passing-attempts-are-nfls-lowest-since-1974-bills-jets-debacle/

Now "they" are GIVING PEOPLE ANTHRAX in order to silence "their" critics who've revealed the ruse!! "They" are truly evil!!! "Their" evil knows no bounds!!!! https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7wz5a/people-got-sick-at-a-conspiracy-conference-theyre-sure-its-anthrax

I am no youngster, and I regularly visit my elderly parents. The risk-benefit calculus clearly weighed against attending thousand-plus people events at this time last year. I am triple vaccinated now, so our my parents, and there is good reason to believe (in fact, it would be truly surprising if the opposite were true) that the recently vaccinated/boosted are very unlikely to have a severe case of COVID. My response was rational then. It's rational now. It's the world around us that's different, at least for those of us not cowering in fear at a little jab. That may have been what you meant to say. What you said is "they lead (sic)* us to believe that the virus hovered over mass gatherings," as in they led* us to believe something that isn't true. Otherwise your sentence made no sense whatsoever. *May we pause for a moment to consider the irony.

This is exactly what you said. Those damn fools (or manipulative liars; sometimes it's one, sometimes the other, sometimes, paradoxically, both) "lead (sic) us to believe that the virus hovered over mass gatherings." That. Is. Exactly. What. An. Airborne. Virus. Does.

Hmm, a deep suspicion of the profit motive. Veiled references to cabals and what "they" are trying to do to "us." Talk of opening ones eyes, to stop blindly believing what "they" tell us to believe. Tastes just a teensy bit like Das Capital to me, perhaps with some grated antisemitism on top. To make the society" [which of course consists of non-workers] "happy and people easier under the meanest circumstances, it is requisite that great numbers of them should be ignorant as well as poor; knowledge both enlarges and multiplies our desires, and the fewer things a man wishes for, the more easily his necessities may be supplied.

Well, o.k., but I'm not the one wringing my hands over a little jab. Man up, get the shot! Don't run off crying like my 4 year old daughter used to.

Again ... this has nothing to do with Amy Coney Barrett or Black Lives Matter protests. Your contention was that we were told - erroneously in your view - that large gatherings may be superspreader events. And yes, the ACB nomination event proved that that was true. The outdoor protests, it turned out, weren't superspreader events in and of themselves. That was just dumb luck since after the fact we discovered that outdoor events are generally safe. Just substitute "Sturgis Biker Rally" for "BLM Protest" and the same analysis applies. The bikers gathering outdoors = no problem. The bikers gathering in bars = big problem. Stop trying to inject the political character of the event in this discussion. Large indoor events were a terrible idea pre-vaccination, and are a pretty terrible idea for the unvaccinated today, regardless of whether they are a Rage Against the Machine Reunion Concert or a Ron DeSantis Is Definitely Not Running for President Rally. We are getting there. I am vaccinated/boosted, and I am about to attend a large Christmas concert event tonight. I wasn't able to do that last year, and even if I had been, I wouldn't have gone.

Let's call them "Capitalists." Let's call you a "Marxist."

Interesting. What is the little "Do Not Comply" button Ben has next to his name? Do Not Comply with what? Why not? Some of this seems to be anticipatory non-compliance. If they mandate this thing, I ain't gonna do it! What is the abstract value of "noncompliance" when it is not tethered to any specific mandate or request? I must conclude that this is political signaling. Except that ones unaware of the fact that they are parroting standard Marxist analysis, e.g., "They will never let it be over."

Just flagging all conspiratorial buzzwords for everyone's convenience. Here's a test for you. Many commenters here throw around terms like "commie" or "Marxist." The test: substitute the term "Capital" or "The Capitalists" for these vague ones like "they" (as used above) or even the more specific ones like "big pharma." So this one becomes: "Capital (the capitalists) have no intention of ending anything." Which almost perfectly aligns with how Marxists analyze such phenomena. I won't go there, but some do, sometimes explicitly, using "They" in an open anti-semitic fashion.

Bring it on ... ... seriously, though: I don't keep track of exactly who said exactly what. I am simply uninterested in carrying on DM conversations, etc. If I got it wrong, well, my mistake.

That was a terrible idea at the time. Since that time we've learned that the risk of transmitting COVID (at least the pre-omicron COVID; we have good reason to believe that omicron will behave similarly, but we don't know for sure yet) is extremely low in outdoors environments.

^This is what I was refuting with my reference to the ACB nomination event. We were led to believe this, and, interestingly, it was true. The virus did, indeed, hover in the air in that room and it did, indeed, infect many attendees, who then brought it into other rooms where it hovered until it was inhaled by the previously uninfected. https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/03/politics/trump-covid-amy-coney-barrett-event/index.html The article lists the cases directly traceable to the event. There are no doubt many, many other cases two, three, four, or more degrees of separation from direct contact. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/03/us/rose-garden-event-covid.html Of course one of the people who probably got COVID at the ACB even was a fat 74 year old man who had to be choppered to a hospital to be given an experimental treatment developed by a Big Pharma company.

Funny, but I look forward to a future in which this comes true - a future in which biomedical innovation renders a pandemic a manageable problem.

Says one of our "Big Pharma is bad; they are profiting from this pandemic" crowd. Hmm, commies? Do I hear commies?

At this point I just have to assume a total lack of good faith argument. I pointed out that ACB is IRRELEVANT to the discussion. The point is this: there was a well attended publicly known event. It included a significant indoor component. It is indisputable that this indoor event involved the spread of COVID 19 to many, many attendees.

So sorry. How could I mix up "Chef Jim" with "Deranged Doofus." I really must pay closer attention.

Look, you said "If we are required to wear a mask on a plane, why not everywhere else?" I explained: whether or not you think mask wearing is EVER required, there is clearly a distinction between personal space afforded by a modern coach class airline and pretty much everything else you encounter in life. You are about 1 foot away from someone else's head, and from that same someone else's head for 2, 3, 10 hours depending on where you're flying. So there's your answer. It is not a "hand wringing" post. In fact, I've been reminded on a few occasions to put my mask back on on an airplane. Maybe you need better examples.

I will just focus on this, because it was meant to be your grand conclusion - the end of the movie where suddenly you see how all the disparate plot elements tie together. First, you don't refute my point: "shuttering in and locking down was remarkably effective" in lowering the transmission rate and avoiding a true nightmare scenario from developing. It's easy to mock it. Haha, "15 days to slow the spread," haha, are we going to be doing lockdowns forevermore?" But ... it worked. It bent the curve in a clear and dramatic fashion. In fact, a lot of that DID happen in the first 15 days, with repercussions continuing for a few months until the second wave hit. By then we WERE more prepared for it. It saved lives. I wish it hadn't been necessary. It was. Second, you don't even attempt to rebut my comment that there is no support for what is, at its root, a mega-conspiracy theory. Remember, one of your propositions is that bureaucracies and governments will try to hide the fact that their policies and/or negligence caused the harm. I accepted that proposition. Guess what? It applies to the United States, to the NIH, to Dr. Fauci, and (wait for it) to the government of the People's Republic of China too! You may know Hanlon's Razor: "never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." China is acting in accord with your proposition. Yet you jump to the conclusion that failure to fully cooperate in an investigation is evidence of an intentional leak. And then you make further unwarranted leaps: "big pharma" (kudos for not using that phrase, but it's really what you're saying, isn't it?) would benefit from something like this; hence, big pharma can't just be waiting in the wings, ready to jump in to try to do good (or even to talk the Administration into Warp Speed); it just MUST be a nefarious actor either somehow causally involved in the spread/creation of COVID, or involved in keeping COVID around so they can keep selling their damn vaccines. This all amounts to "geez, isn't it neat that whatever happens in the world, Big Pharma seems to get richer." Well, consider me unconvinced. Finally, I mention Amy Coney Barrett not because she's the evil Amy Coney Barrett, but because it was the most clear/obvious/public demonstration that large indoor (much of what happened was indoors even though the part the public saw was outdoors) events can be a very bad idea indeed. And you've done nothing to refute that.

Did Trump hold the falafel at the pool, or would O'Reilly not let go of it? https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/fb-5533437/BILL-OREILLY-FALAFEL-PHONE-SEX-CALL-PRODUCER.html The response will be this: - Bill Clinton was on Epstein's plane more times than Trump! To which I say: isn't it time we have a President who was NOT on Epstein's plane? - Trump distanced himself from Epstein when he found out Epstein was "recruiting" underage girls. To which I say: (1) Trump joked about Epstein liking much younger women/girls, which doesn't really show a high disgust reaction; (2) Trump apparently distanced himself when Epstein hit on a teenage Mar-a-Lago member, which suggests that his distancing was more of a "don't sh!t where you eat" thing rather than moral outrage.