The News Thread
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Not Liam though, right?
That omission was not by chance.
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Why are some people so willfully stupid?
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I have not a single ounce of sympathy for that woman, and great regard for the officer who did his job in upholding the law.
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This Cheerleading Mom Wanted To Destroy Her Daughter’s Teammates — So She Used Deep-Fakes
Congratulations on proving yourself to be a sociopath and having your daughter become a potential pariah.
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So they stopped vaccinations with Astra-Zeneca in Germany, as have some other EU countries before this. For what is basically no reason at all, we are endangering the very important process of getting the whole country vaccinated as soon as possible. Plus, the decision to suspend it means that the damage to the Astra-Zeneca vaccination is now so bad that a majority of the population will reject it.
Great work, German health politicians!
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I saw an interesting fact earlier that there have been almost identical numbers of blood clots after Pfizer and Astra-Zeneca jabs and they are statistically miniscule in each case. 17 million people have had it in the UK by now, if it caused a surge in pulmonary embolisms we’d know by now.
So far 24,453,221 people in the UK have been given the first of two doses of either one of the vaccines.
UK monitoring has found about 0.0003 per cent of people have developed a blood clot after.
Around 30 blood clots were reported by 9.7 million people given AZ doses by late February.
In comparison, the figure was 38 cases among the first 10.7 million recipients of the Pfizer jab – just slightly higher.
The figures are lower than what would be expected in the general population, suggesting neither one “causes” blood clots, although this is still being closely investigated.
I can’t help but feel there’s some politics at play here because most of the EU is pissed off with Britain. Macron and the German press started propagating that it was only 8% effective in over 65s, a complete mangling of the actual stat which was only 8% of the test sample was over 65. The actual effectiveness in preventing hospitalisation and death was 100%. The size of the sample may have been a genuine concern initially but this has continued even when there is now a sample base of multiple millions.
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I can’t help but feel there’s some politics at play here because most of the EU is pissed off with Britain.
Nah, they wouldn’t cut that deep into their own flesh. They’re actually still very pissed that they’re getting only a part of the promised 200mil doses.
And the facts of it are bit more complicated (I listened to Dr. Drosten this morning); there’s a particular kind of blood clot (cerebral sinus thrombosis) that does actually seem to be associated with a higher risk in combination with Astra-Zeneca, and this is less likely to have been noticed in the UK because the affected group are mainly young women (and disproportionately many young women got this in the EU for a while because AZ hadn’t been cleared for over-65-year-olds at the time in the EU, which is of course the largest group that got the vaccine in the UK). BUT even if that is the case, the numbers are still ridiculously low, and it is also probably an effect of the immune reaction, so something that is also likely to occur with the other vaccinations.
So even if there’s an 8-in-a-million chance of developing a dangerous blood clot, which seems to be the worst-case-scenario here pretty much, that’d be NO REASON WHATSOEVER to suspend vaccinating with AZ in the current situation. This is just fucking politicians covering their asses because nobody wants to be the one who decided to use it in case it turns out to be harmful.
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Yes, it’s a little more complicated than it first appears and is not just about the number of clots in general but about a specific type of rare brain blood clot. There have only been a few cases of this linked to the vaccine (out of just a relative handful of thromboembolic events recorded overall) but there is at least a marginally plausible concern that there could be a link with the vaccine.
But it is a very small number of cases and the general consensus is that either way the benefits of the vaccine hugely outweigh its risks.
And there is certainly a significant element of political theatre to it all that I think is pretty short-sighted. And not just between the UK and EU – there’s also an interesting lack of cohesion within the EU, as really member states should be co-ordinating these decisions through the European Medicines Agency rather than taking unilateral action on fairly weak evidence.
Anyway, there will be an update from the EMA’s risk assessment committee tomorrow. They might decide that the evidence isn’t strong enough to support the link or they might call for a warning over these rare events to be added to the label, but it’s very unlikely that they will call for a general suspension.
Then we will see how the individual member states react to the EMA’s conclusions, which could be interesting in itself.
But I think whatever the outcome, the damage has been done to a certain extent. Doubt has been seeded in people’s minds around the Oxford/AZ vaccine and I think it’s quite likely you’ll see refusals on a much greater scale than the other currently used vaccines.
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Nah, they wouldn’t cut that deep into their own flesh. They’re actually still very pissed that they’re getting only a part of the promised 200mil doses.
They are sending very mixed messages though with both complaints about the undelivered vaccines and then stopping or limiting its use.
I general I’d agree on the petty politics bit except in the case of Macron because he’s always pissed off with the UK (while quite justified in many cases) and been at the peak of this approach. He actually in the same interview in January complained about the under-fulfilment of the vaccine while repeating the claim it doesn’t work.
“We have to be realistic: the real problem with the AstraZeneca vaccine is that it doesn’t work in the way we expected,” Macron said. “We have very little information … but all the indications today are that it is quasi-ineffective for those over 65 years old.
“Our vaccine strategy is to inoculate health workers and the elderly because it is they who have the most serious symptoms. Today, when I look at our hospitals, 80% of the patients [with Covid-19] are over 65 years old, and two thirds of those in intensive care are over 65.
“The [AstraZeneca] vaccine is no doubt superb in the long term and it will be useful, but it’s not exactly what we need now.”
This has never been true, the sample was smaller than the other vaccines but of the sample the effectiveness was the same in the elderly patients as the young ones. I’m assuming he has national health advisers that are experts like every other national leader so repeating this stuff from a duff news report is bordering on Trumpian.
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They are sending very mixed messages though with both complaints about the undelivered vaccines and then stopping or limiting its use.
It’s all a bit “terrible food, and such small portions!”.
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Just… set off all the nukes. Please. Just boom and we can forget about all this. Big reset pls.
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They are sending very mixed messages though with both complaints about the undelivered vaccines and then stopping or limiting its use.
Not over here, mind you. Fuck Macron (for a number of reasons), but politicians here have been trying to talk up the AZ vaccine as reliable and effective (which it is). And now they’ve shot themselves in the foot because they don’t have the guts to not suspend it until the EMA decision. (I am additionally pissed because I might’ve had a chance of getting an AZ vaccination before the Easter holidays, but that’s gone now. Motherfuckers.) I mean, I still am not worried about my personal health, but… right now, at this moment, I have about seventy relatively close contacts in a week, plus in our teacher’s room there’s about a fifty people during peak times. But secondary school teachers are not moving up the priority list; it’s still just elementary school teachers (who have about 12 contacts a week because they teach one consistent group). This is not a very clever decision from a standpoint of avoiding spreading the infection.
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True enough. It does seem rather jumbled in application.
The interesting thing here is when you get something new you often have to take bold actions and hope later on that they worked. In the eastern hemisphere the big thing was immediately cutting off international travel which has been pretty successful but you can’t watch and wait if it works because by the time you get that data the infection has spread. (They did have some forewarning to be fair because the first ever time I came to Malaysia in 2003 I had my temperature checked by some massive scanner thing at the airport because of SARS and a lot of that was replicated as a response but cutting travel altogether was a step further).
The UK has basically dilly dallied and waited on every decision and suffered for it, bar going hard with vaccines. The uptake rates are really impressive, I see the Wales numbers and the top 4 ‘at risk’ groups are all around 95% with a first dose at least. A large part because they’ve been pretty evangelical with it and closed down the doubters. We still don’t know how well it will reduce the effects down to returning life to normal but the signs do look promising. They are seeing a slight uptick in cases after schools re-opened but the acid test is if that translates now into hospitalisations and deaths or if the vaccine will keep those at risk of that protected, it’ll take a few weeks to know.
- Care home residents: 13,183 (95.7%)
- 80 years and older: 166,302 (94.6%)
- 75-79 years: 126,865 (95.1%)
- 70-74 years: 173,576 (94.5%)
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The interesting thing here is when you get something new you often have to take bold actions and hope later on that they worked.
Yeah, I recently listened to an interview with an epidemiologist who used to work in Africa fighting ebola, and his main message was that no matter what you do, you have to act really fast and thoroughly. That seems to be the most important thing in fighting pandemics.
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Yeah and my location means I take a slightly askew view to some.
Getting a lot of my news and comment from north American/ European sources there’s a lot of debate of how UK/Ireland/Germany/US/France/Sweden approached the virus and I think they all fucked it up to varying degrees. They weren’t well prepared and were all hesitant to act, some worse than others in different aspects.
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The interesting thing here is when you get something new you often have to take bold actions and hope later on that they worked.
Yeah, I recently listened to an interview with an epidemiologist who used to work in Africa fighting ebola, and his main message was that no matter what you do, you have to act really fast and thoroughly. That seems to be the most important thing in fighting pandemics.
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So, this is totally not news, but it’s news for me, since it’s the first I’ve seen about this, which is honestly weird because you’d think a guy like Jon Schaffer would get a fairly good chunk of exposure… I mean he’s not like SUPER famous, but still…
The latest updates are that he’s facing up to 6 federal charges for assaulting a cop with bear pepper spray (among other things)… Seriously, you can’t write this shit xD
Anyways, it’s funny, or rather sad, but basically all of his bandmates accross the board have basically left… soooo, I guess Iced Earth is done… It’s okay I guess, they haven’t really made anything worth listening to in a decade+.
On a side note, I’m absolutely surprised Nugent wasn’t at the capitol riots…
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She was complaining about rights, when she wasn’t charged with violating a mask mandate, but with trespass, when it’s a right in this country for a property owner to have a dress code, and get you arrested if you enter their property without adherence. #KarenLogic
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One woman was arrested for resisting arrest
Err….
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It will be interesting to see where the individual member states go from here.
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It will be interesting to see where the individual member states go from here.
Anders… Always the optimist…
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"Judge Rules Some Ghislaine Maxwell Details Are Too 'Sensational and Impure’ to Be Revealed to the Public"@LambeJerry reports. https://t.co/WsuWsA0X7x via @lawcrimenews
— Adam Klasfeld (@KlasfeldReports) March 18, 2021
I read the article that tweet linked but the legalese is too heavy for me. It seems they are trying to protect “third parties”.
Hmmm…
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"Judge Rules Some Ghislaine Maxwell Details Are Too 'Sensational and Impure’ to Be Revealed to the Public"@LambeJerry reports. https://t.co/WsuWsA0X7x via @lawcrimenews
— Adam Klasfeld (@KlasfeldReports) March 18, 2021
I read the article that tweet linked but the legalese is too heavy for me. It seems they are trying to protect “third parties”.
Hmmm…
Andrew isn’t the only one. There are very powerful people with ties to Epstein and Maxwell.
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Like trying to get the British monarchy to give back all the wealth it took from their colonies over the centuries.
All monarchies, for that matter, not just the British one. And while we’re at it, let’s not forget the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, Joel Osteen, and other religious institutions that have vast sums of wealth and real estate and treasures gained at the expense of their followers.
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A 19-year-old man was indicted by a federal grand jury on Thursday in a plot to kidnap and murder gay men whom he met on an online dating application.
Chance Seneca, of Lafayette, La. kidnapped two men and attempted to kidnap another, whom he met on Grindr over two days in June, 2020.
He was charged on six counts, including hate crime, kidnapping, firearm and obstruction charges.
Authorities say that Seneca attempted to murder one of the victims because he was gay. He also “intended to dismember and keep parts of the victim’s body as trophies, mementos and food.”
Seneca is accused of attacking Holden White, a student at Louisiana State University in Eunice, on June 20.
White spent nearly a month in the hospital, after he was tortured by Seneca, according to police.
The 19-year-old told The Acadiana Advocate that the two had met on the app, and that Seneca insisted on picking him up from his apartment.
According to The Associated Press, White said that Seneca wrapped a cord around his neck so tightly he lost consciousness. When he woke up later, he said he was in a bathtub, and that his wrists had been repeatedly slashed.
After the attack, White said that Seneca left him for dead.
Investigators said that a day before kidnapping White, Seneca tried to kidnap one man and successfully kidnapped another.
The indictment, which was announced by Acting U.S. Attorney Alexander C. Van Hook for the Western District of Louisiana, claimed that Seneca had a firearm while committing the crimes and later tried to cover up his plans by deleting electronic communications between himself and the victim.
Seneca was initially charged with attempted second-degree murder. The hate crime charged was added in January.
According to Van Hook, the maximum sentence for the hate crime, kidnapping and firearm offenses is life imprisonment. The statutory maximum for the attempted kidnapping and obstruction offenses is 20 years. The statutory minimum for the gun charge is five years.
“All I’m going to say is he is getting what he deserves,” White said in a statement to The Acadiana Advocate on Thursday. “And justice will continue to be served.”
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COVID-19 vaccinations for all adults in Texas starting March 29, state officials say
HOUSTON – The Texas Department of State Health Services said Tuesday that all adults will be eligible to receive a COVID-19 vaccine in Texas beginning Monday, March 29.
The Texas Department of State Health Services said it expects vaccine supplies to increase next week, and providers in multiple parts of the state have made great strides in vaccinating people in the current priority groups. The state’s Expert Vaccine Allocation Panel recommended opening vaccination to everyone who falls under the current Food and Drug Administration emergency use authorizations to protect as many Texans as possible, according to a news release from TDSHS.
“We are closing in on 10 million doses administered in Texas, and we want to keep up the momentum as the vaccine supply increases,” said Imelda Garcia, DSHS associate commissioner for laboratory and infectious disease services and the chair of the Expert Vaccine Allocation Panel. “As eligibility opens up, we are asking providers to continue to prioritize people who are the most at risk of severe disease, hospitalization and death – such as older adults.”
DSHS has directed vaccine providers to prioritize people 80 years old or older when scheduling appointments and accommodate anyone in that age group who presents for vaccination, whether or not they have an appointment, by immediately moving them to the front of the line. That will ensure vaccination of anyone 80 or older with as small a burden on themselves as possible.
Also next week, DSHS said it will launch a website to allow people to register for a shot through some public health providers. The public will be able to enroll in the Texas Public Health Vaccine Scheduler to identify upcoming vaccine clinics hosted by DSHS or a participating local health department and be notified when new clinics and appointments become available. People can continue to find additional providers though the DSHS Vaccine Information page at dshs.texas.gov/covidvaccine.
Online registration will be the best option for most people. For those for whom that is not an option, DSHS will launch a toll-free number to provide assistance making an appointment with a participating provider or locating another provider that has vaccine available.
To date, Texas has administered more than 9.3 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine, equating to more than 6 million people with at least one dose and more than 3 million fully vaccinated. Most vaccines are authorized for people 18 years old and older; the FDA has authorized the Pfizer vaccine for use in people 16 and older.
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Like trying to get the British monarchy to give back all the wealth it took from their colonies over the centuries.
Not to defend monarchies but by the time of the height of the British Empire it had already moved significantly into a ceremonial role. While for good narrative reasons the US war of independence is framed around ‘repelling King George’ that isn’t echoed in Europe where Prime Minister Frederick North more correctly holds that role as the man directing the war efforts.
George the 3rd had already been banned from having any say in the British courts and when his son tried to replace the PM his efforts failed and a reform act was passed to reduce their role even more. At the height of Britain’s imperial wealth Victoria was so uninvolved she hid in isolation in Scotland for many years.
That’s not to say the monarchy didn’t profit from their colonies but the truth is the British state really takes responsibility and the men who voted them in.
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I think in a lot of countries the colonizing entities functioned more or less independently from the state. The Dutch East India company which controlled Indonesia was a trading and shipping company that defended their interests with mercenaries and genocidal violence, they were a law unto themselves with little oversight by the Dutch state.
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Police: Witness alerted Atlanta store manager to armed man
ATLANTA — A sharp-eyed Instacart worker is getting credit for averting what could have been another awful crime in Atlanta, where a man brought body armor, ammunition and at least five guns into a grocery store.
Charles Russell spotted the man inside a bathroom stall with one of the rifles and alerted a manager at the Publix store, urging him to call 911. Police then converged on the store and arrested the man without a shot being fired.
Rico Marley, 22, was scheduled for an initial court hearing Thursday on charges including weapons possession during an attempt to commit felonies. Investigators also said Marley was undergoing a psychiatric evaluation. It’s unclear whether he had an attorney.
Russell told WSB-TV that when he saw the man in the store’s bathroom on Wednesday, he immediately thought of Tuesday’s mass shooting at a King Sooper’s in Boulder that left 10 people dead.
“It possibly could have stopped something,” Russell told the TV station. “I seen an AR-15. (That) kind of startled me with the events that recently happened in the grocery store up in Colorado. To be able to stop it (a shooting), if it were going to be something, that’s what I cared about.”
The incident also happened days after eight people were fatally shot at three massage businesses in the Atlanta area.
Atlanta Police spokesman Anthony Grant said police responded to the Atlanta Station Publix at 1:30 p.m. and saw Marley leaving the bathroom. They quickly held him for questioning, and found him with two long guns and three pistols, all concealed. Police later said a sixth gun was in his possession as well.
Police have been working since then to determine what exactly Marley planned to do with the arsenal. There were no reports of Marley pointing a weapon or using a weapon before authorities arrived.
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The ship in the Suez is freed…I’m feeling a little bit of national pride that Dutch companies played a part in getting it unstuck.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-56567985
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This was my favorite one of the memes
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The Covid thing is behaving a little weirdly here. Having been relatively lightly affected for most of 2020 and daily cases in double figures after an early lockdown and entry controls it flared up late in the year and into January with around 3-4000 cases a day. We locked down a lot for a month or so but being a developing country they can’t really afford it, there is no social security programme etc.
So while numbers were not improving they started opening up it by bit and and now we’re pretty much back to where we were before with essentially everything open, schools fully opened in Feb and only mass gatherings still stopped. As more has opened up though ….. the cases have dropped, we’re now down to around 1000. Vaccines not a factor as they’ve barely started on it.
Death rate remains low and I think that’s mainly because of the demographic getting it, a lot are listed as foreign nationals and that means most of them are factory workers from poorer nearby countries. They will in the majority be in their 20s and 30s, have no extended family here so a low risk of passing to the elderly but living in cramped shared apartments – so even if the factories are very good with hygiene and spacing it’s pretty much negated by the fact that they’ll go back to live 10 to a 3 bed flat. They also need good health to get their visas and obesity would be close to zero so they are at very low risk. None of that is an official narrative but I can work it our by various other stats and the locations being reported.
To see the comparison Australia has a slightly smaller population (25m v 32m) we have recorded well over 10 times as many cases but only 300 more deaths.
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It’s definitely been behaving differently in countries with a different age structure – that’s something we’ve been seeing in African countries, too. Though some of this may be a problem of under-reporting. I think in South Africa, the assumption is that the virus swept through most of the population without anybody really noticing (because of the young age of the people involved, and presumably because there was no testing in townships and the like) and left them with a form of herd immunity, slowing down the pandemic without anybody really understanding why for a bit.
It was at this point that researchers based in Cape Town began testing for traces of the virus in blood samples provided at local clinics by pregnant woman and HIV patients.
Virologists like Dr Marvin Hsiao were surprised to find that on average 40% of respondents had developed coronavirus antibodies with the majority being unaware that they had been infected.
Preliminary indications from a similar study in Gauteng, which contains the country’s largest city, Johannesburg, reveal that approximately one third of those tested had been infected.
“Inexplicably, the numbers (of those infected with COVID-19) started dropping off at the end of July, and at the time I couldn’t explain why,” said Dr Hsiao.
“But when we analysed the data it become clear, this immunity within the population level (linked to) the big surge infections is probably the main reason why we’ve seen the decrease of numbers of infected.”Of course, this is why we got the South African mutant.
Anyway, that was a very specific phenomenon, and I’m not saying that something similar might be happening in Malaysia. There’s all kinds of phenomena with this pandemic that we’ll only be able to figure out much later.
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I think the age profile here is part of it. It’s nowhere near as low as in parts of Africa but it would be lower than most of Europe and north America.
I think another area that’s a little sensitive for the news is obesity. BMI is being used to prioritise in the UK. Malaysia remains in the lower half on that measure internationally.
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So tell them YOU MUST GET THIN BECAUSE COVID and we’ll solve the obesity problem overnight.
If they’re telling people not to eat fast food then can we call them anti-Macs protestors?
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So tell them YOU MUST GET THIN BECAUSE COVID and we’ll solve the obesity problem overnight.
Yes, because heart disease, joint issues, strokes, and diabetes aren’t enough of a deterrent.
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So tell them YOU MUST GET THIN BECAUSE COVID and we’ll solve the obesity problem overnight.
If they’re telling people not to eat fast food then can we call them anti-Macs protestors?
I couldn’t tell if that was supposed to target anti-vax or anti-mask, but then I realized it can be two things.
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Yes, because heart disease, joint issues, strokes, and diabetes aren’t enough of a deterrent.
This is the real issue. It’s never been exactly a secret that being overweight, or drinking, taking drugs or smoking or whatever are bad for your health.
The question is how you approach it.
A direct accusation/shaming approach actually hasn’t proven very successful. Allen Carr (not the gap-toothed British comedian, another guy) who produced a very successful smoking cessation programme said scare tactics tended to have people double down and his take was to convince smokers they don’t actually enjoy most of the cigarettes they smoke. Which is largely true.
Saying ‘don’t be fat’ probably wont work very well, like with smoking which has generally been a success you have to take a multi-pronged approach. Control sugar in our food which has gone off the charts in recent years. Make exercise easy and attractive. Maybe find financial incentives, I have a life insurance policy and the more I show exercise via a Fitbit the more they reduce my premiums.
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Denmark is sending back its Syrian refugees. This is just outrageous, Syria is in no way safe.
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About 900 Syrian refugees from the Damascus area had their temporary protection permits reassessed last year.
Now, the Danish government’s decision about the Rif Dimashq area of Syria will mean the same applies to a further 350 Syrian residents in the country.
[…]
The refugees will be moved to a deportation camp, where they will have no access to education.
That’s appalling. Jesus.
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A direct accusation/shaming approach actually hasn’t proven very successful. Allen Carr (not the gap-toothed British comedian, another guy) who produced a very successful smoking cessation programme said scare tactics tended to have people double down and his take was to convince smokers they don’t actually enjoy most of the cigarettes they smoke. Which is largely true.
True – mainly it’s another Puritan argument and that has been used against worker’s rights, recreational drug use, homosexuality, and, basically, having any kind of fun. I think the latter approach of pointing out that being healthy will often enhance enjoyment.
The reason people in general engage in unhealthy behavior from junk food to actual junk (heroin) is that they want to feel good. Can anybody deny that? So making people feel bad about these things will simply increase the urge to do them because that’s the easy solution to feeling good – or at least temporarily feeling good.
In the cases of real addiction, the addiction is a problem because the addict cannot control it. That is the essential element of addiction. If someone could just choose stop smoking or eating unhealthy food, then they aren’t addicts. So any argument, no matter how rational, that depends on people simply “making better choices” is doomed for the people who have the most serious problems.
Mainly because unhealthy behavior is not a problem for the people suffering it, it’s a solution. Like a lot of recovered drug addicts bring up, the physical suffering of quitting is not what sends them back to the drug during the period where they are trying to fight the addiction. The central problem is that the drug was their way of dealing with all the other problems of their lives. Using doesn’t eliminate all the other problems, but it does eliminate the suffering resulting from them at least for a little while and gave them some space and reason to continue enduring the problems. However, when they stop using, they still have all those other problems that they were avoiding by using.
The same process occurs in various degrees from overindulgence in any other activity including, lately, fitness. If you follow any of the fitness YouTubers or Tik Toks, it has become a very obsessive space with a lot of unhealthy advice and unrealistic expectations that will not lead to actual healthy behavior — and, of course, a lot of the most successful fitness experts have bodies they could only achieve with steroids and other PEDs and every few years you’ll see one of them die of a heart attack in their 30’s or 40’s.
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If someone could just choose stop smoking or eating unhealthy food, then they aren’t addicts.
Exactly, that’s why the ‘just quit’ is the most annoying and ineffective approach, usually coming from people who have never had a real addiction.
In the UK it took an incredible amount of time (into the 2000s) for doctors to switch from a ‘just quit’ approach to smoking to actually providing support in the way of prescriptions for patches/gum/pills, support literature and even hypnotherapy. Which brought results.
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Lieutenant: Kneeling on Floyd’s neck ‘totally unnecessary’
That it actually has to be said that kneeling on someone’s neck is unnecessary…
That’s the thing with this affair. If police schools are teaching this as an acceptable technique, it should be the police leadership on trial, not Chauvin.
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That’s the thing with this affair. If police schools are teaching this as an acceptable technique, it should be the police leadership on trial, not Chauvin.
Some of this is apparently down to one free market police trainer (and possibly others like him) who is very explicitly training cops to be killers, and the regional police department have been eating this up for decades.
Apart from the bit about Dave Grossman and the horrible shit he’s teaching cops, the whole episode does a very good job at exploring the systemic reasons for police brutality in the US.
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No one liked the Covid numbers here in the province of BC when it was 400 a day. Then it just got worse and another (partial) shutdown (restaurants, etc.).
Now we just had back-to-back days of over 1000.Seems political. Why not enforce the laws? Sometimes, but daily people and restaurants are flaunting the laws.
I figure there’s more good than bad, of all the age groups.
But those that don’t care anymore are doing damage (and they really don’t care, it’s obvious).We’re so close to the end!
(Kind of, we haven’t scheduled 65-55 year olds yet.)And since I’m talking, all the loonies have found it acceptable to crawl out from under their rocks, and they are fucking everywhere!
Flat earth is only the tip of the iceberg.
That’s it’s own topic, but I’m not the only one that’s noticed.
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It’ll be interesting to see how we deal with the fallout when the pandemic is over. It exposed a lot of flaws in our political systems, and in the ways we live together, and it brought out the worst in some people (and the best in others, of course). There are a lot of lessons to be learned, but one does have to wonder about the conspicary believers and anti-vaxxers and just those whose general instability has brought them to the brink in this period.
For Germany, one thing this crisis has definitely already demonstrated is that the aspect of our health system that deals with mental health is pretty terrible. Our medical insurance system means that in theory, you can get therapy whenever you need it for free, but for thirty years now they’ve kept the number of therapists allowed to operate within the system artificially low so costs don’t rise too much, and at this point that means that we don’t have enough therapists available by far and there’s months-long waiting lists to get a therapists. It’s incredibly stupid and will create far higher costs in the long term (as with any restriction of access to early medical treatment).
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Millions of Americans might not get vaccinated because they don’t realise it’s free.
“I don’t want no free vaccine… gimme one that’s going to bankrupt me!”
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A coworker said she wasn’t going to get the vaccine and was going to rely on the “herd” to protect her.
I reminded her that the weakest in the herd tend to die first.
She paused for a moment then said the accepts that.
Jesus. Fucking. Christ.
Another reason I’ve seen for people not getting the vaccine is that they already had COVID-19 and they believe they are now immune to it, completely ignoring that the scientists have said that immunity fades away after about 6 months.
Jesus. Fucking. Christ.
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I’ve yet to hear a valid reason from any relatively-healthy adult as to WHY they won’t get the vaccine shot. Without a valid reason, you’re just being a stubborn ignorant fuck. People are still getting sick from this virus; people are still dying from it. It’s not going to just disappear, no matter how deeply you bury your head in the sand.
Dumb fucks, the bunch of them, putting the rest of us at risk due to their stupidity.
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@Todd I was watching golf yesterday with my mom and aunt and Mom kept asking where all those big crowds are coming from and why none of them were wearing masks. Then they showed where the tournament was taking place and we all went “ahh”
it was in Texas
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@Todd I was watching golf yesterday with my mom and aunt and Mom kept asking where all those big crowds are coming from and why none of them were wearing masks. Then they showed where the tournament was taking place and we all went “ahh”
it was in Texas
That doesn’t surprise me at all.
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Chicago mayor calls for reform after 13-year-old Adam Toledo shot dead by police
How long have there been calls for police reform? Since the Obama administration? Since before then? How about we see some actual reform?
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A coworker said she wasn’t going to get the vaccine and was going to rely on the “herd” to protect her. I reminded her that the weakest in the herd tend to die first. She paused for a moment then said the accepts that.
It’s similar to arguments against the stimulus checks by financial advice “entertainers” who say stupid things like “$600 isn’t gonna help anyone” or that “if you need $$600 to survive then you have bigger problems before Covid 19 even hit!”
First, obviously, there are plenty of people for whom $600 and $1400 is going to make a big difference and it’s not because of any problems they had with money before the pandemic.
Second, that’s just an argument that it should be more than $600 and paid many more times over the entire length of the pandemic.
Third, it is in addition to extended unemployment benefits as well as business loans and grants.
Finally, it’s not just for that one person. That’s $600 for millions of people that they will spend fairly right away into the economy to keep it moving. THAT is going to make a big difference for everyone.
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Surprising no-one, I am sure:
Twenty-six of the companies listed, including FedEx, Duke Energy and Nike, were able to avoid paying any federal income tax for the last three years even though they reported a combined income of $77 billion. Many also received millions of dollars in tax rebates.
On the other hand, Biden seems to really be moving on the matter of taxes and public finance:
The biggest and most eye-catching proposal is to trim the sizable reduction in the corporate tax rate enacted under Mr. Trump. In 2017, Republicans shrank the rate to 21 percent from 35 percent. Mr. Biden wants to nudge the rate part of the way back — to 28 percent.
Not the most interesting proposal though.
The other provisions are primarily intended to ensure that multinational corporations cannot avoid taxes on profits generated overseas. The hope is that this will reduce the temptation to set up operations or offices in foreign tax havens.
And:
The plan, which still lacks detailed provisions, is “both an undoing and a pushing in new directions,” said Mihir A. Desai, an economist at Harvard Business School. “The more novel aspects relate to how it changes the way we think about foreign operations and global income.”
Through a series of complex and arcane provisions, the Biden administration would essentially treat profits earned abroad more like those earned at home — raising rates and requiring that taxes be paid on time rather than pushed far into the future. It would also establish what would in effect be a minimum tax on foreign income.
That could be a bit of a game-changer.
It’s also interesting that Janet Yellen is at the same time starting to call for an international minimum corporate tax, which would be a hugely important step.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Monday expressed support for a minimum tax rate, providing the vital backing of the U.S. government.
Yellen, in a speech, said a minimum global tax rate would stop what she described as a “30-year race to the bottom” that has allowed big corporations to avoid contributing fully to vital national needs.
The support for a global tax rate is a new plank in the Biden administration’s tougher approach to corporate taxes.
I am carefully optimistic about the Biden administation’s approach to these issues.
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So tell them YOU MUST GET THIN BECAUSE COVID and we’ll solve the obesity problem overnight.
Yes, because heart disease, joint issues, strokes, and diabetes aren’t enough of a deterrent.
Well that’s my point. Those things are clearly not enough, because people have been ignoring them for decades. But covid is on an entirely different level, people are making unimaginable changes to their lifestyles in response to it.
Big Macs: so essential to people’s enjoyment of life, nobody’s going to give them up even though they might develop a host of medical conditions.
Never seeing your family for an entire year because there’s a chance of covid infection: yeah, sure, we can all do that.
I don’t care how yummy Big Macs are, tell people stop eating because covid and they’ll stop eating.
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I don’t care how yummy Big Macs are, tell people stop eating because covid and they’ll stop eating.
And then you’ll have some people eat twice as many because they believe COVID is a hoax.
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And then you’ll have some people eat twice as many because they believe COVID is a hoax.
spoken like a true Texan
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so we’re in the bizarre position where the same folks suggesting that the vaccine is ineffective at best and unsafe at worst are also mad that it’s not yet available to most people…
Yup the same as we saw with Macron. ‘This vaccine doesn’t work, we are enraged our deliveries are delayed’.
The problem is those headlines can cause so much sway. The blood clot incidents are genuine but extremely rare and haven’t been found in any recipients over the age of 80, who are your first priority after front liners. Bearing in mind the UK has administered roughly 20 million of them with 30 total cases and zero cases in that age range there’s no need to panic.
I don’t know how much it’s being reported but I look specifically at the Wales data because of my family and the figures are pretty spectacular. Since January they’ve gone from 650 cases per 100k to 20 today, 53 deaths a day on a 7 day rolling average to 0.8. You can’t attribute it all to the vaccine but it’s certainly not the weather when France currently has 10 times the transmission rate.
Anecdotal stuff can be so dangerous, my wife today read an account of a man getting a vaccine here in Malaysia (Pfizer at the moment – no AZ have been delivered yet) and he had a fatal heart attack. Now even though we’re relatively slow here they are administering over 28,000 a day, now mostly to old people. What are the chances a few of them will get heart attacks anyway? Very high.
Registration take-up has been low here because of repeated rumours the vaccines use pork products, they don’t and the makers have posted several denials and a full list of the process and materials but there you go. it’ll move me up the queue anyway.
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They haven’t finished all the over-50’s yet. Once they have done, I’m pretty sure they’ll be quickly and efficiently onto the over-40’s. In fact I know they are, since my girlfriend’s sister and husband have already booked theirs for later this month.
Some areas are ahead of others, but as long as you have have an NHS number, you’ll be contacted sooner or later.
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Got some info from Mike which simply explains the science behind the choice for under 30s.
He also pointed out that risk level for blood clots is lower than that of the contraceptive pill. 0.2 is the same risk level as the flu vaccine has of causing a rare fatal condition I have never heard of. You are 60 times more likely to die of a road traffic accident in the UK.
So what he’s saying is we are bad at depicting true risk and we already have a very high level of caution in our approach to medicine and vaccines. With other choices available it makes sense to concentrate the AZ on the older group and other vaccines for the youngest which ironically is the reverse of the previously thought advice as we now know it is effective for over 65s in preventing infection due to the enormous sample size in the UK and the rapid decline in all the metrics of cases, hospitalisations and deaths.
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Debenhams to briefly reopen 97 stores in closing down fire sale
Collapsed chain pledges up to 70% off unsold fashion and homeware and half-price beauty products
Time to pencil in a story about crazy crowds of bargain-hunters not respecting social distancing for Monday afternoon.
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I’m sure somehow this is all Meghan Markle’s fault. Prince Philip dies only a few weeks before he’d have got a telegram from the Queen.
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it’s ridiculous that the state broadcaster across almost all its many avenues isn’t offering any form of content for people that don’t want to spend the entire day focusing on death/listening to Nicholas Witchell.
You’d better move to France, you goddamn commie!
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And if you’d like to know more about the Duke’s life and death, you can tune into literally every BBC radio station, which are all simulcasting the same endless obituary thing.
Everyone needs to be extra alert for whatever the government will be trying to sneak under the radar today.
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it’s ridiculous that the state broadcaster across almost all its many avenues isn’t offering any form of content for people that don’t want to spend the entire day focusing on death/listening to Nicholas Witchell.
You’d better move to France, you goddamn commie!
If only.
It’s fascinating exploring the commercial radio reactions to this as they’ve resisted going off for news (though the ones owned by the same company as LBC have put notes on the Sky Digital channels to switch to LBC for “a major news event”) but have switched to the most sombre music they can manage within their remit (with next to no presentation, more regular news updates and no ads as far as I’ve noticed). Classic FM’s fine, they’ve got all the funereal music you can shake a stick at. Planet Rock’s had stuff like Hallelujah and Albatross on. Radio X has had to resort to the likes of Wake Me Up When September Ends and Californication. Heart’s wimped out and taken it’s Dance station off (which is supposed to be doing “non-stop club classics”) and just simulcasting it with its main station.
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How dare they!
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I’m sure somehow this is all Meghan Markle’s fault. Prince Philip dies only a few weeks before he’d have got a telegram from the Queen.
It took less than three hours
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