191–200 of 245 posts
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A guy gets a worm in his brain, somehow becomes secretary of health, loosens all the rules so the rest of us have a higher chance of getting a brain worm. This is comic book villain kind of stuff. Can we start a serious discussion about whether we might be living in a simulation with a troll teenager at the controls?
What rules are you referring to that he loosened?
Only slightly unrelated, but I've been thinking a lot lately about prion disease and whether or not you can still trust the meat you eat. Easily a food safety concern that is ten times worse than getting a little diarrhea from your salad, and the same institutional rot can contribute to it. And it would take 5-10 years to really see the damage done from it.
A guy gets a worm in his brain, somehow becomes secretary of health, loosens all the rules so the rest of us have a higher chance of getting a brain worm. This is comic book villain kind of stuff. Can we start a serious discussion about whether we might be living in a simulation with a troll teenager at the controls?
Nah. Power centers consolidate and seek slavery, whatever other differences they may have there is consensus there, which we can tell by their practices.
The "mission" of most people we recall by name is really just "knock out any pillars you can find, and cause chaos", they're given free hand and in that sense it's not planned or predictable, but overall it's no more random or silly than dead cows hurled via catapults. The cow has no name, no history, no meaning, it isn't hurled at a precise location in the exact right instant, but at a general location during the siege. And one thing is sure, it controls nothing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A guy gets a worm in his brain, somehow becomes secretary of health, loosens all the rules so the rest of us have a higher chance of getting a brain worm. This is comic book villain kind of stuff. Can we start a serious discussion about whether we might be living in a simulation with a troll teenager at the controls?
What rules are you referring to that he loosened?
Last year CDC scaled back the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network from eight monitored pathogens to two. Cyclospora was one of the six dropped. The remaining two are Salmonella and E. coli. For what it's worth, there has also been an uptick in salmonella cases. Food policy experts have pushed back on the assertion that the policy change caused the outbreak, but concede that outbreak response programs are underfunded and the fact that cyclospora no longer being monitored makes it difficult to understand how it fits in with longer trends.
What the food policy experts say really points to the broader issue - an overall decrease in response and monitoring capability - and that's a bigger concern than playing the blame game on one particular outbreak.
It's reasonable to question how government agencies are making these decisions and one just yesterday on the peptide industry may be one of the best examples yet of how flawed the decision-making process is. The FDA's Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee (PCAC) met and voted in favor of adding several peptides to the list of substances compounding pharmacies are allowed to produce. Eight members of the panel had been recently appointed under RFK, including six who run clinics that offer peptides, increasing the size of the panel from 6 to 14. The votes on the peptides were 8-6.
So... back to my comic book villain theory. This is exactly how a comic book villain would do it and fool everyone with a veneer of legitimacy.
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The Americans have what’s basically a cultural trait at this point of deflecting ownership of their government’s actions with “not my president so not my failure” abdication of responsibility. I wish we could open trade talks with these people instead. But, alas, that’s not how it works.
Fine, it’s all my fault. Neither me nor my state voted that way, I’ve protested like hell, but nonetheless at your insistence I accept personal responsibility for the policy choices of the federal government. What do you propose I do? Or did you just want my permission to be personally angry at me? Not sure you needed it, but you’ve now got it.
They asked to stop deflecting. Take that literally. Imagine this page without the comment and the comments hanging off it.
"Don't do this thing". "What should I do instead?" Your choice. Maybe nothing. When there is nothing serious to say, maybe sit with the silence, that space where a little joke or some cynicism would relieve the pressure without doing any productive work, and let it work on you. At least until you can't take it anymore, and maybe tomorrow you'll last longer, and maybe next week you'll have a breakthrough.
At any rate, others can't tell us how to fix a situation we're not part of causing. In a society of millions, while each can say "I'm just one of many", nobody else can say more, so we always have "full" responsibility, that is, the maximum possible. Put differently, it is not possible for a single person to be solely responsible for what two people do, but that doesn't change the responsibility they do have.
This isn't about spilled milk, but rather about the question on who it is to fix this. It is on you. If you cannot do it alone, you have to organise with others. But there is nobody, as long as you're an adult and a citizen, that you can point to that should be expected to "do it" instead.
Though I don't mean this in a finger-pointy way either because we all sit in glass houses. There may be differences in degree and all that, but when it comes to what should or could be, and how it is, we're all so far from the mark that bickering about who is the worst and who should get "the" blame for the situation, rather than how to change it, seems pointless.
> Or did you just want my permission to be personally angry at me? Not sure you needed it, but you’ve now got it.
I personally wish you a really awesome weekend, stranger. You insisted on making this personal, now deal with it >:[
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I think the worldwide disruption of the pandemic melted people's brains, and the recent surge in the anti-vax movement is a symptom. Along the lines of: if all this bad stuff happened and my life was significantly harmed, it must be someone's fault; all those doctors and scientists kept advising everyone on what they thought was happening and what to do, so they're probably the ones who caused the problem.
I say this as a committed fan of RNA vaccines and masking, who believed we could have contained covid with more serious lockdowns very early in the pandemic: In point of fact, it was someone's fault, and the someones whose fault it was - the ones doing gain of function research - were the same people who took control of lockdown policy in the US. That would be enough to melt a lot of people's brains, even if it weren…
But what is never discussed in the Lab Leak pursuit is: so what? I mean, yes, poor biosecurity and containment should be called out and not covered up, but the real value is in being the foundation of a conspiracy. "The government conspired to make you sick!".
Think about this: covid has mutated consistently since it's been tracked. Were those mutations coming from a lab or was it viruses doing virus things. Was Ebola made in a lab or did it come from a place we know viruses come from.
Was the Spanish Flu a Chinese plot? Was AIDS?
The handling of the outbreak was clearly bungled, but let's remember who was in charge in the US when it happened. The guy who shut down research and tracking teams because Obama had funded them (So had Bush -- until then, this kind of stuff was non-political and taken seriously as a non-partisan issue).
The failure for masking was again, on the then POTUS, and it's been conjectured by many (including myself) that he was against masks because it would mess up his makeup.
Yes, it could have been handled so much better, and sadly, could have been an incredibly valuable teachable moment that made us all safer in the future. But instead it was used to further divide us and foster the literal fucking insanity of antivaxxers. I have nothing but contempt for those people because they are a danger to humanity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A guy gets a worm in his brain, somehow becomes secretary of health, loosens all the rules so the rest of us have a higher chance of getting a brain worm. This is comic book villain kind of stuff. Can we start a serious discussion about whether we might be living in a simulation with a troll teenager at the controls?
Two things that got RFK nominated. He's the opposite of Fauci, who Trump hates for contradicting him. And MAGA hates because during the pandemic they saw mask mandates as government overreach. And he's the poster boy for conspiracy-loving anti-science halfwits like Trump and MAGA. And he got approved because GOP senators get primaried and death threats if they go against Dear Leader.
I mean this is the guy who as head of HHS has funded research in his government department to "figure out which other government department is doing chemtrails" (He named DARPA as his prime suspect on an episode of Dr Phil, ye gods). You can't make this shit up. If it wasn't for his family name and connections he'd be living somewhere in a trailer as a sovcit with a Don't Tread On Me Decal adorning the back of his pickup truck on blocks in the front yard while he barbecues armadillo roadkill.
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Filter for dates around his presidential run: "he's not really anti Vax", "he's the only candidate talking about health"... With Dorsey and other SV actors boosting him. https://archive.is/kce6f
"Darling candidate" is overselling it but there's a solid chunk of anti-vax, covid-truthing, lab-leak is-proven-fact, JFK just wants better food nutballs on HN. They overlap with the climate deniers, the nukecels, libertarians and Trump fans. And it clearly goes to the top, since his vice-president and primary funded was a Google CEO ex-wife, and he had high level support even before he went back on his stated opinio…
On Dr Phil, an audience member raised concerns about "stratospheric aerosol injections." Kennedy responded, "That is not happening in my agency. We don't do that. It's done, we think, by DARPA," referring to the Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. "And a lot of it now is coming out of the jet fuel. You know, those materials are put in jet fuel. I'm going to do everything in my power to stop it."
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They should stop calling themselves republicans, since they don't represent a republic.
Don't get me started on the words being all used incorrectly or misunderstood! Liberal, conservative, democracy, socialism, communism, free market. These are core concepts to a lot of current political debate and yet the words are effectively meaningless the way people use them. It wouldn't matter except the gap in understanding is exploited to paper over a bunch of dishonesty and corruption.
> Yuri Orlov: [Narrating] Every faction in Africa calls themselves by these noble names - Liberation this, Patriotic that, Democratic Republic of something-or-other... I guess they can't own up to what they usually are: the Federation of Worse Oppressors Than the Last Bunch of Oppressors. Often, the most barbaric atrocities occur when both combatants proclaim themselves Freedom Fighters.
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If it results in more and fitter offspring it will be selected for.
Sounds like a nice topic for a PhD for someone 100 or 1000 generations down the line...
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FWIW raw milk is actually OK. Drank it “directly” from the cows, never got sick from it. *directly = cow milked into a cup.
Raw milk _can_ be kind of okay under very specific circumstances. (But knowing the state american farms tend to be in regarding hygiene and controls, it's a ridiculous gamble.) 1) extremely closely controlled cow health 2) minimal storage time 3) minimized chances of cross contamination/reasonably clean cows 4) healthy immune system to minimize infection chances If even one of those isn't there, it's basically sickne…