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Author | Topic: Coronavirus and Pandemics | |||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
You know how the fundamentalist pastors are telling their flocks that the corona virus is just a hoax and they are specially protected by God and all that? So the entire congregation must ignore those atheistic scientists and medical doctors and gather together in large(ish) crowds pack tightly together and shaking each other's hands.
From an old acquaintance I follow on Facebook, there's report of a second such pastor who has died from that "hoax virus":
quote:Worker threw exception | www.rawstory.com | Cloudflare The first one he reported on Facebook: Virginia Pastor Who Said COVID-19 Was Anti-Trump Mass Hysteria Dies of Virus :
quote: Of course, the petri dish of infection vectors that they had waded through in NOLA is the reason for NOLA's current status of being the next hot-spot in this pandemic. This pandemic might end up doing some good. But at what cost?
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
To everyone: Ignoring the Trump razzing, ... Uh, what "razzing"? I was just stating factual observations. It is a solid fact that Trump has screwed the pooch royally, so how does pointing that out amount to "razzing"? And I think that I raised a very valid point about what Trump's objectives might possibly be. Decades ago, I read something like: "Never attribute malfeasance to something that could be explained by complete ignorance and incompetence and utter stupidity." And yet, despite all the ignorance, incompetence, and utter stupidity, there is still a kind of genius to Trump. That genius is in part knowing how to deceive his followers, but the other part is how to cash out on whatever is happening. Despite all his other massive failings, he is still a prime opportunist. The questions I raised in Message 259 involved his objectives. This is very basic operations. Like so many other similar evolutions, your first question is what your objectives are, just what are you trying to accomplish? Then you need to identify what your own sub-objectives are. That is your goal, so now you need to plan out how to achieve your objectives. Now mind you, this identification of objectives and evaluations of strategies for achieving those objectives functions on many different levels, with the top-most level planning for the overall movement of all troops and the ultimate objective while the lower-most is for your squad to take and hold that hill (review Little Roundtop at Gettysburg: "The flank must hold. Gentlemen, we are the flank." And completely out of ammunition, they charged down the hill and they held the flank ). So just what are Trump's objectives? That was the question I raised. There is the short game and the long game. Well, today we have the new bill that Trump just signed into law for economic relief during this pandemic. About 2 trillion (1012) USDollars to companies to keep their employees on the payroll, etc. No increases to paying their CEOs (as happened before) and no layoffs. What the Democrats had to fight hard for and finally got was Congressional oversight over the distribution of those 2 trillion dollars by Trump toady Steven Mnuchin. Trump's immediate statements were to the effect that the bill that he had just signed into law did not make Congressional oversight mandatory, whereas it did. Oh, yeah, it really did! So Trump wants his toady, Steven Mnuchin, to disburse all that money before any congressional oversight can even know what had happened. Maybe even to Trump-owned businesses ... why not? And of course, the truly long-term planning would be to somehow invalidate the 2020 National Election. Or to keep it from even ever happening under some kind of emergency powers. Edited by AdminPhat, : fixed broken link
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
There are no state or federal quarantines anywhere in the country. Trump spoke of opening up large and largely unaffected portions of the country by around Easter, despite his advisors' opinion that Easter was way too early and that the entire country would eventually be affected. It was dangerous to the country for Trump to say anything that might encourage people to cease mitigation practices early. Netflix has a documentary series, Pandemic (2020). One of the sites covered over most episodes is a rural hospital. The local outbreak strained that hospital to its limits, but they just barely held on thanks to the extraordinary efforts of the medical staff. If it had been just slightly worse, that hospital would have been overwhelmed. Republican healthcare systems mismanagement on the state level (eg, refusing federal Medicaid expansion under the ACA) has resulted in the failure and closure of many rural hospitals. That leaves so many red states far less able to handle the surge of patients that's coming -- coincidentally, MSNBC right now (1111 PST) is reporting on how rural hospitals are already becoming overwhelmed. And when the virus moves through the countryside, those victims will flood into the city hospitals which are already being overwhelmed. The MSNBC report had hospital management saying that while they had been able to just barely hold on up to this point, this pandemic will destroy them and force them to close after it's over. That will leave far more areas of America without healthcare services. Removing mitigation measures even in the most "unaffected" areas is a guarantee for disaster.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
As I recall, it was reported that the fish tank cleaner was chloroquine phosphate, implying that it was not the same stuff. However, Wikipedia says that "chloroquine phosphate" is another name for chloroquine, so they actually are the same thing. More specifically on that page:
quote: So then actually what went wrong was that fish tank cleaner is an industrial/commercial form of the compound, not a medical form. Since Faith will not understand the difference, let's consider another important medication: nitroglycerin:
quote: So then what do you imagine would happen if you starting feeling chest pain and decided to self-medicate with some industrial strength nitroglycerin? Well, it most certainly would stop the chest pain, though I'm unsure whether it would have gotten down far enough to take out the chest in addition to the head. Now to continue that analogy, imagine a public figure with a large following that believes everything he says no matter how obviously false. That public figure ignorantly advises his followers that nitroglycerin is a cure for heart attacks, but he neglects to specify the medical form only (along with other medical considerations). So a number of his followers, who are similarly ignorant, use the explosive to treat themselves with the expected consequences. The message should not have been "Use nitro", but rather "Seek medical advice and care." And for that, that public figure's best audience would not be the general public, but rather medical professionals (who would already know far more about the subject than that public figure). So, back to chloroquine, rather than present it to the general public as a sure cure, Trump should be advising the medical community to look into it and, far more important, listen to the medical experts' responses and learn from them. The true tragedy is that Trump does not listen, nor is he capable of learning, so he will continue to place the public in totally unnecessary danger with his ignorant public pronouncements. I've heard that the wife in that self-poisoning tragedy survived, though not yet recovered, and is warning everybody to not listen to what Trump tells them. At least there's one positive consequence.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
First, I'll make my own predictions so we can compare mine with your article's. Besides which I feel reluctant to follow a blind link (or whatever it's called here), since you have told us nothing of its contents.
So how did my own predictions match up with your article's?
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
If your bank doesn't know what your account number is, then find another bank that's competent.
IOW, that is obviously a scam. We're going to see a lot of scams like that. Besides, what I'm hearing is that it will take a few weeks for Munchkin to get around to disbursing those checks. Talk about lack of competence.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
I almost never use a link provided in an email and even then only if I have very high confidence that it's legit. Instead, I go to the bank's website and log into my account there. Or I get on the phone and call the bank with the number that I look up on my own, not the number provided in the email.
Unfortunately the elderly are common victims.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
Reminds me of a request for help on a C programming forum that I used to contribute to.
The request was for C code to implement a "Barber poll". Well, obviously this was some kind of statistical analysis technique that we hadn't heard about, so we asked for more information and a more complete description of what he was trying to do. He replied with, "you know, that twirly thing in front of a barber shop." The forum was international with the foreign members for whom English was not their first language. That idiot was obviously a native English speaker, since he had no clue how to spell -- the most atrociously bad English was committed by native speakers. A non-English speaker would not have made such a stupid mistake, but instead would have slightly odd sentence structure or wordings or would have chosen the wrong word from the dictionary. But other than that, their English would be far superior to native speakers' (especially the SMS kiddies). For example, a student in Portugal wanted to know how to use "lights" in multi-threaded programming. That made absolutely no sense and nobody could figure out what he was talking about. Knowing some Spanish, I had a hunch which I followed in Wikipedia, switching between languages. In multi-processing, the processes' access to common resources is coordinated (AKA "synchronized") through various software mechanisms including semaphores (ie, signals as in signal flags, etc). The word in Spanish for traffic signal is "semforo" and that also turns out to be the word in Portuguese. When he looked up semforo in his dictionary, it translated that to "lights" which is what we call our "traffic lights".
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
Spitballing again, but it seems that thirty minutes in 150F/65C oven would sterilize a mask pretty well. A paper or cotton mask, anyway - one that would partially melt wouldn’t do so well. Somehow today I caught mention of UV irradiation as a sterilization method. A few or more years ago, I saw an advert about a UV container for one's toothbrush for the same effect. No idea what it would take to obtain that.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
... the Russians ... Speaking of which, what's happening in Russia? I haven't heard nor seen a single report from or about Russia.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
nothing is happening in Russia, everything is fine over there. Vlad wouldn't lie to us would he? Yeah, that's what I thought.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
when did trump get a medical degree? He doesn't need one. Without any kind of training or study, he knows everything about everything, much more than all those people who have actually studied such subjects. Just like Faith.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
When I was stationed in North Dakota I would sometimes listen in the car to a radio station in "The Peg". I heard them refer to Canada as "Big Lonely".
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
I was based in eastern ND (the cold part) for 5 years. The nicest people you could find, but around 1980 it felt very isolated plus the weather could get a bit much at times. That part of the state is in the region that includes Int'l Falls, MN, where arctic air masses would descend from Canada and sit on us, making Int'l Falls the coldest place in CONUS (US excluding Alaska and Hawaii). If you remember those scenes in Dr. Zhivago where he's trudging across flat empty frozen expanses, that was filmed on location in the Canadian plains (mainly Alberta, as I seem to recall from the credits). When we arrived in July, we were told a joke that they do have four seasons there: June, July, August, and Winter. Then we learned that it wasn't a joke. Another joke explains the population distribution in Canada, that they're all huddled together on the southern border for warm.
I rather liked it there, but work opportunities weren't there (software engineer) so we moved back to SoCalif which also made my wife happy. Our son chose to go back to ND for school and then decided to stay there. However, his wife is from Florida so guess where he's living now.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
Another point of wild speculation: India's lack of toilets.
I saw a documentary (not the Netflix "Inside Bill Gate's Mind" episode where he's funding research into third-world self-powered sanitation systems) which said that in India people basically poop just about anywhere. It's almost a cultural thing such that government efforts to promote toilets and sanitation have met with resistance. Just about everything including the water and the ground is permeated with human fecal matter. Surviving that kind of environment might lead to a stronger immune system, given the wide range of pathogens the body gets exposed to. Sure you have a high mortality rate, especially infant mortality, but look at the herd immunities you get for it. Isn't that the plan that Faith and her crowd wanted for us? Kill off lots of people in order to create herd immunity to protect the vulnerable -- except for the fact that it's the vulnerable who will be the first to get killed off. So one thought is that India's lower infection rate could be due in part to a generally higher immunity the population has acquired by a life-long exposure to a wide range of pathogens which killed off the weaker ones. Just a bit of wild speculation.
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