Maggie's FarmWe are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for. |
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Thursday, November 19. 2020Thursday morning linksMeteorologist Danielle Banks explains why one Alaska city will not see the sun until next year. George Mason U. professor finds Bible, reports it to ‘bias’ hotline Workers vs. Wokeness: Recognizing Campus Social Justice as a Luxury Good Surprise: The "Smartest" People Are Actually Painfully Stupid Study Warns That New Work-From-Home Trend is Making People More "Racist" New York Times op-ed admits 'Trump was right,' Democrats 'wrong,' about keeping schools open. "Some things are true even though President Trump says them," Times opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote US COVID-19 Deaths Top 250,000 As Mortality Worst Since Spring: Live Updates Photos Emerge of CA Gov. Gavin Newsom's COVID Rule-BUSTING Double-Standard Dinner If the aim is to push individuals with Down Syndrome out of the workforce, I guess it’s a great idea. Biden Backs Relief For Student Debt, Everyone Who Paid Their Debt Gets Screwed… Mitt Romney Says 20 Years In Afghanistan Isn’t Long Enough Dems Reportedly Planning To ‘Californicate’ Georgia Runoff Elections The Democrats’ Guide to Losing Gracefully Trump’s Parting Gift to Biden: A More Stable Middle East. He was successful because only an iconoclastic president could have rejected false assumptions and failed strategies. Trackbacks
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Desperate times call for desperate measures.
As someone who financially put everything on the line to do what I wanted, I am livid over rich politicians wiping out small business by decree. Imagine being 60 years old and being wiped out financially because of a Covid decree? And then the rubbing salt in the wound "Because it's for your own good." Now you are 60 years old and have nothing. No money, no savings. And how do you start over at age 60. It's too late in life to build another career. How many times has this happened in the last 9 months? So I don't blame them in the least for staying open. I hope more of them decide to do it. ‘It Was A Matter Of Survival’: Suburban Restaurants Flout COVID-19 Restrictions, Continue To Serve https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2020/10/24/chicago-suburbs-indoor-dining-kis-steak-and-seafood-restaurant/ I hope they hang tough too. It reminds me of when I was in New Orleans when they had ridiculous blue laws. People and retailers rebelled. On one Sunday, several large retailers refused to close and essentially told the police to come and get them. Nobody was arrested and the blue laws were quickly a thing of the past.
It would seem that scores (hundreds?) of smaller businesses would be a lot harder to control than a few large ones but then the smaller ones would be easier to intimidate. They need to organize into a unified front. This is where voters should learn to be careful about what you allow your state and local government to mandate. Those of us in Missouri allowed the state to have no lockdown mandate. They can suggest and produce data but that is all. Local establishments, like Columbia (home of Mizzou) are mandating lockdowns and it is killing local business but why should I have sympathy for those that vote for intrusive government and then find out it is destroying their life.
A Swiss politician is thinking about denying health care to anti-maskers who get covid. But wait! If masks work no one wearing a mask would get covid. I mean, am I right or what?
Does social distancing work? Well, not 6 feet but 600 feet might work. Does anyone really believe that 6 feet is a magic number? Do shutdowns work? Well if they worked we wouldn't have any covid after the first shutdown. But they don't work and we are in our third shutdown as if to prove how stupid politicians are. I actually think that the great Thanksgiving shutdown is to take attention away from the great election steal. The shutdown is so important that California politicians had to go to Maui to study it. Maui! Why not Tijuana? Oh wait, I know why. I just checked the COVID-19 dashboard:
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus According to this, the US at present has suffered about 35,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases per million population since the start. So, given the US population at about 330 million, that translates to about 11.5 million people in the US that have already had COVID-19; In other words, 3½% of the population has had it already, and this is only confirmed cases. Now, based upon anti-body surveys, the CDC estimates that actual COVID-19 cases outnumber confirmed cases in ratios anywhere from 6:1 to 24:1. This is from late June: https://reason.com/2020/06/28/cdc-antibody-studies-confirm-huge-gap-between-covid-19-infections-and-known-cases/ So in other words, the number of people in the US that have already had COVID-19 would be in excess of 20% of the population - using the conservative ratio. (AVI can I ask your perspective on this, serious question). Where are the rational, data-based policy measures, one might ask? We believe in Science - not so? My mom is over 90 and in Assisted Living, which so far has managed, with all of its workers coming and going, to keep COVID-19 out of the facility. But they are only now starting to open up to let family in to see loved ones, and then only in tightly controlled settings. I have no quarrel with this, it has obviously been successful - I only wonder at the politicians and policy setters that preach iron-fisted shutdowns for Everybody while privately attending no-mask dinners in trendy settings or enjoying Thanksgiving with family. Looking at you, Governors of California, Michigan, New York and Illinois, and your Minion Mayors too. For people to believe in the Science, they have to see it translate sensibly, equitably into non-partisan actions. The numbers are all over the place. I very much hope there is 20% coverage already, or even more. I don't know the answer and I don't know who does. One difficulty of measurement is that we can tell that the isolated peoples in facilities were probably not exposed without anyone knowing it, because a facility will suddenly show many cases after months of showing none. Yet those are the people mostly likely to show symptoms, as a majority of them have other conditions.
The people walking around on the street, going to school, supermarket, work, are much less likely to show symptoms at all, so we don't have a clear idea whether they've had it or not. You can find whatever numbers you want to prove your point. The hardest thing for everyone to accept is that whatever we do will be wrong. I'm not just saying that to be cute or cynical. If we don't shut down, more people will die. If we do shut down, more lives will be ruined. Once those planes left Wuhan, one set of bad things or another - or both - was going to happen. Worse, bad things may have happened even without the international flights. The mere existence of C19 may have meant that sooner or later, both death and economic destruction were cards that were already dealt, awaiting play with better or lesser skill. Everything is tradeoffs, and the people who irritate me are those who pretend there is no cost either way. As one might expect, those are usually the most highly declarative folks who are quick to accuse others of bad motives for disagreeing. Everything is a tradeoff. We decided to try delaying exposure and transmission - '15 days to flatten the curve' to allow the medical field time to prepare... and we did, only to see mostly empty hospitals. Then there was a second 'hump' in June/July/August, and a corresponding drop. Now we're going into a third hump. The numbers of positive tests seem absolutely insane, but SO FAR the numbers of deaths haven't really ramped up.
This IS going to burn through the vulnerable population. We're going to have a certain number of minor illnesses, severe illnesses, and deaths. We can mask, we can handwash like crazy - and it's STILL going to spread. The vaccine(s) will help a lot. And we've got folks in high office casting doubt on the efficiency of the vaccines, because Trump. But at this point - I see a whole lot of folks in high office pretty happy with this Pandemic. It allows them to unleash their inner dictators, and the results are predictable. "If we don't shut down, more people will die. If we do shut down, more lives will be ruined."
I won't argue that there are no right answers, but any thinking person can immediately come up with a few that are a whole lot better than the ones being purveyed by a lot of bottom-feeding policy makers at the moment. With the voluminous data available now, how is it possible that someone isn't identifying cohorts of people with similar risk profiles and developing recommended behaviors for them to follow to keep safe? It boggles the mind. Industrial Safety came to the realization years ago that the only beneficial safety culture that really works is one that is behavioral-based, using risk assessment and a systems approach toward getting people working safely. . This isn't rocket science, it's Public Health. We've been feeding this bureaucracy for years, and this is the best they can produce after 9 months of Pandemic: Lockdown for the Squares and open rioting for the city Mobs? Fah~! "A Swiss politician is thinking about denying health care to anti-maskers who get covid."
Statist thinking at its most pernicious. Presumably smokers should be denied healthcare then? Or those who contract various diseases through unsafe sex? Or anyone with an addiction? Smokers yes, they aren't popular anymore. Unsafe sex? Don't be silly, they are free spirits. Addiction - it depends. Are you addicted to poor white people's drugs or black people's drugs? SOL. Addicted to rich white people's drugs? you autobiography will sell.
And obesity, from learning to love the starchy foods they gave you for school lunches? That's gonna be your problem, Jasper. The 6 feet social distancing rule is based on a simple idea: The politicians needed to do something and 600 feet would be impossible. It would mean zero access to grocery stores or anything at all. But still, they needed to appear to be doing something so it was reasoned that 6 feet was doable; that is it would still allow people to go to the stores, allow the stores to open AND most importantly it would look like the politicians were doing something to prevent the spread. Simple as that.
Let me give you an unrelated example of officials lying or stretching the facts so that the facts can be made to appear to support the official story: We all remember the OK City bombing where McVeigh built this huge bomb all by himself and killed people when he blew up the Murrah Federal Building. The FBI had a problem. It is physically impossible for one person to mix up the 15 tons of ANFO that they decided blew up the building. It is like mixing concrete a very physically demanding job. SO first they altered the story to use a much higher flammable hydrocarbon rather than the diesel fuel normally used. This allowed them to decrease the total weight of the AMFO. But this still made it an impossibility that one person could mix the AMFO. SO the FBI tinkered with the combination of explosives used and came up with a phony number and that was it, no more questions allowed. Anyone questioning the official story will be punished. But the fact remains that ANFO is not powerful enough to do the damage we all saw AND that even if as little as a ton of ANFO was used it would still be impossible for one man to mix the ANFO. But that's the official story and everyone who has looked into it knows it isn't true. So either there was a much larger bomb with more powerful explosive (which implies state sponsorship because McVeigh wouldn't have been able to get more powerful explosives) OR this was an inside job and the bomb in the truck out on the street was a head fake. Either way the citizens should know the truth AND the FBI and our political leaders lied to us. Not quite getting your point. References please?
Where does "15 tons" come from? Was there more than one truck? How much would fit on the truck we heard about? Why do you think the diesel or whatever had to be "mixed" with the ANFO? It wouldn't explode if you just poured it on? Was McVeigh too busy working at the supermarket or something to spend a weekend emptying sacks into barrels and pouring diesel in them? Even I could do that and I'm 68. I get your point, the FBI (etc) lie all the time. Maybe they lied here. Or maybe McVeigh had the brains to arrange the barrels in a V-shape so they would act a bit like a shaped charge or IED. Even Arabs have figured that out. Occam is your friend, even when he disagrees with you. 15 tons was the first estimate of the FBI. The problem they had was that the truck was 25 feet or so from the building but then inside the building was the atrium style entry which was wide open. Both of these things weaken the blast effect of the bomb on the hard structural components. Yet one of the central concrete pillars was 5 feet thick reinforced concrete that had been severed. ANFO can’t do this when exploded at any distance at all. A much higher explosive could as could a explosive charge placed on the pillar itself. So the initial estimate of the size of the explosive had to be big, really big.
No, one truck, but some experts say that in order to do that kind of damage there had to be some explosives placed inside at critical places. You could place 15 tons of ANFO in the truck, probably not much more. ANFO is a good low power explosive but the diesel and ammonium nitrate must be mixed really well. If the diesel is simply poured over the AN then when it explodes only 10%-20% actually explodes the rest burns and oxidizes making a smokey smelly mess. It must be mixed really well to be effective AND once mixed it slowly begins to separate due to gravity. So if it took you 5 days to mix the first batch being 5 days old may only be a 50% explosion the second batch a little better, etc. McVeigh or anyone mixing this by hand would probably be totally exhausted mixing a ton of it. Remember the FBI theory was that he stopped at a remote rest stop and spent a day or two mixing it. No way could he mix 15 tons. SO this forced the FBI to conclude that maybe it was only 2 tons or so but that he used a racing fuel with much more power. They also theorized that he may had added addition high explosive on top of that. All of these guesses were more about making their theory of a one man job still possible. But none of it fit the facts. The damage reflects either a very powerful explosive OR additional charges inside the building OR both.
The FBI lied. There are two possibilities: McVeigh was the fall guy for a larger conspiracy perhaps a dozen or so terrorists and military grade explosives. In this case either the FBI knew this and needed to cover that up OR they suspected this and being unable to find the terrorists chose to pin it all on McVeigh so that they didn’t look incompetent. The second theory is that the ATF had been involved for some reason to place live explosive charges around the building and McVeigh not even knowing this set off his weaker bomb which triggered the ATF bombs. And when the FBI discovered this they felt they had to cover for their fellow feds. You could set it up as kind of a shaped charge but using 55 gallon barrels full of ANFO and the distance to the target probably wouldn’t make much difference in the result. The problem is that ANFO must be in contact with what you want to blow up (not 50 feet away) AND it needs to be contained as in a drill hole. Prager yesterday comment of Russians, supporters of Stalin, being tortured by Stalin, lamenting "If only Our Comrade knew of our plight."
Our discussion then turned to "Exactly what did Trump Do TO you that causes you to think he is The Bad Man?" A second hand example in the talk is a disabled vet. "Biden is going to give us More." My question is "How was your life experience different in the 10 years preTrump compared to Trump years? You may just find that you do get More from Biden, Good and Hard. Daughter voted democrat, much to our dismay. Monday morning she got the news of now being unemployed. This may give her some time to reflect. I have two suggestions for your jobless daughter:
(1) learn to code, or (2) come on down to San Antonio, we have PAID job training programs going begging, with a seamless transition to full-time employment. Not into job training? I see at least two HELP WANTED signs on businesses, every time I drive to the supermarket or restaurant. Just a matter of time before some judge declares the Bible to be a hate book.
US COVID-19 Deaths Top 250,000
Fake news. I've learned from the internet trained medical experts here that covid is a commie plot headed by Soros and the DNC. I just learned on the Internet that my Great Grandfather's 1915 Model T is eligible for a warranty.
There's all kind of good things lite that if you just look. Great deals too. /s The fourth link is specifically addressing people like you.
Give a read. Twice. Rudy Giuliani's press conference exposed far worse election cheating then previously believed. Perhaps millions and millions of votes nation wide stolen by the voting machines with mere millions being stolen by other means. It was implied that every state using the Dominium Machines that down votes were stolen/changed as well. That is many of our congressional elections were stolen as well (and of course many state level elections too). This isn't conjecture or conspiracy theory the irrefutable evidence is in hand and being presented to courts. The estimate is that Trump may have actually won 420 electoral college votes in this election.
I live in Orange County, California. We flipped two blue seats back to red. We do not use Dominion in this county. Go figure.
I'm an old man now, ex military, grew up on mean streets. I do something that is hard to explain, Whenever something happens I don't look at the distraction I look around and behind things. I have done that since about age 12. I even do it when I go to movies or live shows. I watch the rest of the screen/stage or the audience or even the exits. I keep one ear on the action and both eyes and the other ear looking for the scam. Right now, I'm not liking what I'm seeing. Not just on the election but on everything even worldwide. This shit isn't over and I think there are forces taking advantage of our inattention. I've gotten out of my seat (figuratively) and have begun to move towards the exit door.
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