oldmanfan

You can’t read. I have suspected that for a while. I used to think you deliberately lied about my posts and others, but the truth now seems apparent. You just can’t read. So I will repeat, and expand upon earlier comments. Biden screwed the pooch on this. The actions taken to abandon Afghanistan without ensuring that Americans in country and Afghans that have supported us over 20 years were evacuated are reprehensible and will stain our country for years to come. Biden has full and total responsibility for that, and will have to live with the deaths to come over the next days. Americans should, must, hold him responsible. But, and yes there is a but, progress in Afghanistan? Don’t make me laugh. The last 4 administrations have screwed this up. Trying to negotiate with the Taliban, trying to prop up puppet governments that never had the will to fight for their own country. We never did what America should have done; stand up for the values that made us a superpower. Stand up for the rights of the women and girls in that country. Stand up for good against evil. I have said this morning and will say so again; Bush should have done what his father did in Iraq and gone in with overwhelming military force and recruited our allies to do so with us. The Taliban should have been wiped out then and there, and because he didn’t Obama should have, and because Obama didn’t Trump should have, and because Trump didn’t Biden should have. Instead Afghans were given the illusion that things were OK. Women and girls were given the illusion they could be educated and have place in society. Muslims who did not share in the irrational militant views of the Taliban were given false assurance that they would be safe. And all that time the Taliban waited, because they knew they would win because we along with the laughable Afghan government did not want to win. Instead waking up today our country looks feckless and weak. Biden owns his part in it, the pathetic excuse for a withdrawl. Previous leaders join Biden in owning their part, thinking you can use diplomacy and limited military to deal with an irrational enemy determined to destroy us. You don’t negotiate with irrational thugs, you destroy them. We’ll be back in Afghanistan soon; the Taliban will soon start their genocide and the terrorist groups will start forming again. God hopes that when that day Biden will act like a Commander in Chief when it does and do the job. And if not we need a President that will. And a country that backs him or her.

I know we disagree on Afghan policy but thanks for writing this. The same folks criticizing him being in Camp David (which he should not have done in my opinion, but as you say correctly he had all the ability to manage things from there) had absolutely no problem with Trump sitting his fat ass on a golf cart when important events occurred.

Biden screwed the pooch on the withdrawal, no question. The images from the airport yesterday are inexcusable. But I will also say there’s a lot of chicken hawk people around here. Trump was going to get us out, too. He “negotiated” with the Taliban who no doubt laughed at us behind his back. Trump screwed the pooch too. Obama wanted to get us out and he screwed the pooch with Afghan policy. And Bush started the whole damn thing and didn’t have the stones to finish it. What we have needed is for a President with the strength to say to the America people that America stands for good in the world, and that the Taliban are evil. That we as a country stand for freedom and we will not stand by and allow women and children to be enslaved. We should have followed the model Bush Sr. used in Iraq. Convince our allies of the importance of destroying the Taliban, go in with absolute overwhelming land and air forces, get the job done, and leave a force their to keep control. We have tens of thousands of forces in Japan, Germany, South Korea to keep the peace. This is equally important. Instead we have people on TV all day, and so many posting here ripping Biden apart as if he solely is guilt. Rightfully so for the botched withdrawal. But when the women and daughters of Afghanistan get killed or enslaved again, and when terrorist groups start multiplying there again, and when China buys up all the rare earth minerals there and kicks our ass economically, what it will show is a failure of administrations over the last 20 years to stand against inhumanity, and a failure of the American people to understand the responsibilities of the strongest power in the world to live up to the ideals that made it such. We will be back in a Afghanistan within a year, mark my words. And when we are forced back in, I hope we will be America again.

Why in the hell did we not evacuate our citizens and Afghan allies before we took our troops out? I understand the idea that we can’t be there forever and all that. But I sure as hell don’t agree wit it. I haven’t agreed with Afghan policy for 20 years. This is good vs. evil and America is supposed to stand for good. At least we used to.

Yes I would.

I couldn’t be more right. Breakthrough infections may be happening with delta because the vaccines don’t generate an localized IgA response, but there is absolutely no question whatsoever that the vaccines protect against morbidity and mortality. No question whatsoever. Now, will boosters perhaps be needed? I anticipate such, probably yearly with the mRNA technology used to rapidly create vaccines against new variants. But to say the only people not getting Covid are healthy people with healthy immune systems is wrong. Plenty of physicians and nurses in my health care network will tell you so. There was a great article posted by a pathologist at the University of Iowa on this I will find and post tomorrow.

Equity should mean an equal shot as far as I’m concerned. What you do with it is on you. I agree that you don’t keep bad folks to meet some kind of quota, but the idea is to open up more opportunities for those who may have been closed out.

I believe people who are trained in educational process should design curriculum. What is going on now is right wing politicians trying to hijack the process for their political purpose, and left wing politicians trying to hijack the process for their political purpose. And worst of all parents using their kids as political pawns as mentioned earlier. And if a teacher goes off the reservation then that should be addressed with the teacher and up the chain if needed. Regardless of the situation. I have had to follow that process once when I basically had to teach my daughter Anatomy and physiology because the teacher was wrong on too many things. I did not, however, manufacture a crisis and go screaming in front of the school board totally disrupting things to do so. One of the right wing nuts manufacturing the CRT nonsense in our community, who also is one of the rabid anti-mask nuts, snuck into our high school and started taking pictures of classrooms because they had masks required signs. She started ranting that these are the same teachers want CRT and posted this nonsense. Now, the fact that those mask signs were from last year because teachers had not come back to school yet, and the fact that CRT is in fact not taught, we’re of course ignored. And several teachers have now been threatened. So yes, the attacks from organized groups are real.

Dude I have taken training in it every year as part of my workplace mandatory yearly requirements. My daughter is a DEI counselor. I understand it. The idea is to help everyone understand why we should all be judged by the content of their character. And my training has nothing to do with politicians, it’s because the board and CEO of our health network know it makes a better workplace.

They are not discussing it being taught by and large. It is right wing demagogues saying they are teaching it with no evidence as such. Again, in the district where I live the superintendent had to deal with parents yelling and screaming about it. When he pointed out that the curriculum is controlled by the state Department of Education and includes nothing about CRT, the parents with a political agenda had already left the meeting because they did not want to hear the truth. Parents yelling about this are using their kids as political pawns. It is shameful.

That is what diversity, equity and inclusion teaches. Will that work for you?

Completely agreed

Of course it’s very early, but you have to admit as a Bills fan you had a smile on your face watching Rousseau the other night.

Watch. Within a year we’ll have to put trips back in. This thing has been messed up by 4 separate administrations, 2 Republican and 2 Democrat.. Should have done the job the right way in 2001.

CRT to my knowledge is not being taught in elementary my or high schools so your point is moot. If someone tried to push it on school systems to teach then yes they would be. I have said numerous times I do not think CRT should be taught at a secondary school level. I have also said that diversity, equity and inclusion education should be and that there are folks, including parents, saying it is the same as CRT, which it is not, and that parents are shamefully using their children as political pawns.

I don’t think we will eradicate Covid, but we will control it. I don’t know of a coronavirus that has been eradicated.

Vaccines by definition mount immune response which is exactly what they do. The delta variant is more infectious and there are so-called breakthrough cases, but I believe there are studies showing vaccinated people are much less likely to transmit. Covid works the same as other viruses, it infects and propagates. As more get vaccinated the amount of hosts go down as do viral loads. It will take time. I doubt we will ever completely eradicate Covid but we can and will get to a point where it is controlled. My guess is we’ll be getting yearly Covid immunizations like we get them for the flu.

I agree it would be great to have effective anti-virals as for example with HIV. The vaccines will eventually slow down or stop transmission as the virus is deprived more and more of hosts. But then the virus mutates to try and keep the advantage as we see with delta. The vaccinated carrying high loads is a small subset of the total vaccinated as I understand it. Bottom line is the vaccinated are now being asked to mask again to try and spare the unvaccinated from their own stupidity.

We will have to see whether Covid can be eradicated. The effectiveness of the vaccines, especially mRNA vaccines, in preventing illness is promising and because of the technology they can rapidly sequence the genome of any variants and adjust the mRNA to compensate. I don’t think we will completely eradicate Covid, but we will markedly limit its spread as more get vaccinated and hosts are decreased. And hopefully as with many viruses the more it mutates the less harmful it will be.

As I said, viruses evolve to tricks the immune system. Some are better at it than others. And because it’s not a 100% effective response you think it means zero. Forty years in research and I have to sit here and have some science wannabe try to tell me how viruses work.

Yes he was the bad guy because he did the Code Red. Duh. No, defending this country is not a bad thing.

You are absolutely wrong. It resides in the respiratory epithelium in conducting airway epithelium where it propagates and eventually reached the airway exchange epithelium of the alveoli and surrounding capillaries where it wreaks havoc. It is no different than other viruses; it enters felled, uses those cells to propagate, and if you can generate an immune response against it you defeat it. It comes down to the ability of the immune system to generate a response, which in turn has a lot to do with the availability of the receptor proteins to the immune system and the ability of the virus to mutate and fool the immune system. Some viruses such as the cold virus and HIV have been able to adapt such that we can’t generate an effective immune response. Others such as polio and measles are essentially eradicated. You are a classic example of the ignorance on this board. To you if it’s not 100% it must be zero. That is not how science or virology works. Pathogenesis of COVID-19 from a cell biology perspective Robert J. Mason European Respiratory Journal 2020 55: 2000607; DOI:10.1183/13993003.00607-2020 Read and learn

Good question. We should have.

Zealots generally are not very helpful to any cause. She looks like a prime example.

I have a doctorate in Anatomy and have done cell biological and clinical research for over 40 years, plus I teach physiology (including basic immunology) and sit on an FDA advisory panel. Viruses are not cells. They are basically packages of DNA or RNA generally with a protein coat (capsid) that allows the virus to attach to the host cell. The Covid-19 spike protein is an example of such. Upon entry into the host cell the viral DNA uses the host cell’s protein synthetic apparatus to create more copies of the virus. Eventually the cell dies, the now multiple copies of the virus go on to infect other cells and propagation continues. Vaccines work by inducing the immune system to either make antibodies (humoral response) that block the viral receptors on host cells or induce T cell responses (cellular immunity) that recognize and kill the virus. Either way, vaccines induce immune responses that decrease the ability of viruses to infect cells, and when that happens the virus is deprived of its ability to propagate. This is basic virology and immunology. Now, what is your background, and do you want to continue arguing?