#25 | POSTED BY YAV AT 2021-10-09 05:36 PM | FLAG:

That's because Biden didn't beat Trump. Trump beat Trump. 81 million people didn't come out to vote for Biden. Just against Trump.

Biden was never anyone's first choice. Pretty much what the DNC pushed as "inoffensive place holder not named Trump.'" He's never accomplished much in Washington other than longevity - and immediately following Trump and his many "accomplishments," while progressives had plenty they wanted to see done, the moderates and independents who voted Biden in might have even appreciated someone who just didn't do that much. And as could be expected, Biden isn't proving highly adept at the herding cats reality of dealing with the D's and purely political obstruction of the R's.

Where I'm going is the longer this goes on, the less Biden looks like a leader, and the more time away from Trump's presidency there is, the more polls are likely to look bad for Biden and good for Trump. Yet I wouldn't place too much weight or wasted concern on that. By the time we hit 2023 and Trump starts plastering himself all over the news again, people will be reminded what they didn't like. Republicans might even wake up to the fact he could play kingmaker, but his own name (not to mention behavior) will just be too toxic to win again. And I highly doubt Biden is running again. We have a chance for a stronger, newer more progressive candidate. Although hopefully not Kamala. If anyone could manage to rip defeat from the jaws of victory ...

Earth

#1 | POSTED BY LEGALLYYOURDEAD AT 2021-10-09 06:50 PM | REPLY | FLAG:

Yeah, but what if they meant intelligent life?

#13 | POSTED BY SNOOFY AT 2021-10-09 12:47 PM | FLAG:

You're right on that count. I just don't trust big pharma, despite working in healthcare myself lol. Not that I believe they're inherently evil, or operating under some conspiracy - what's that line, nobody trusts pharmaceutical companies until they're saving their lives? (Apparently a lot of right wingers not even then.) - I just don't expect them to exactly strain themselves to break out of a profitable model either. Cynical in my middle years lol

#4 | POSTED BY DANFORTH AT 2021-10-08 04:50 PM | FLAG:

Unfortunately with Delta, now the dominant strain, the viral load being lower among vaccinated is not true. The rest of it generally is - while the viral load jumps equally as high, statistically the vaccinated do have less severe symptoms and for a shorter duration. Near as I understand it, the Delta variant is so virulent it ramps up to massively higher viral loads than others, faster than the immune system can respond - however once it begins to respond, the vaccinated immune system handles bringing it back down quicker and and with generally less symptoms than the unvaccinated can expect.

One of the reasons I tend to argue that unless we come up with a better vaccine, the coronavirus isn't going anywhere - it's now endemic. Of course, I'm not in any way arguing against getting vaccinated - you're still 5 times less likely to contract it - not really an impressive number, but far better than nothing - and 11 times less likely to die from it according to most recent CDC data.

I'm not at ALL siding with the antivaxxers, but unfortunately my standard left wing distrust of anything profit driven and disgust with money in politics doesn't have high hopes for a better vaccine to come out any time soon though. When you have Big Pharma rush out a vaccine under Trump that loses half it's efficacy against infection (not severe infection, that seems to retain 90% efficacy) in just 6 months seeing a likelihood of more profit from endless boosters bought with tax dollars from politicians with stock in their companies and bribery, er, lobbying as usual, to keep pushing mandates to force demand, there's not exactly a lot of motive for them to improve upon the situation.

Take that with a grain of salt. I think in the politicization of this vaccine we've ended up with a lot of Republicans pretending Covid is a conspiracy and the vaccine is somehow more dangerous than the virus when it is demonstrably not, both statistically and anecdotally as the place I work at hasn't lost one vaccinated patient, when we lost close to 20% of them in the initial wave of the virus, but I think we also have a lot of Democrats so eager to oppose Republican idiocy that they've enshrined this vacccine as perfect and unknowingly become as in denial of reality as Trump himself when he claimed one day the virus would magically "just disappear." It's VASTLY better than nothing, but we're going to have to accept at some point that even 100% vaccine compliance is not going to eliminate this virus, and we need to continue r&d as well as not letting down our guard despite the fact I think we're all universally "Covid fatigued."

Good lord, that's a terrifying title.

Unless you mean soon the rest of the US will be highly populated with hot latinas. I'm not too old for one last hideous (hilarious?) error in judgement in my failed relationships.

It's obviously not the product of a sound mind and wouldn't ya know it? the author claims to have graduated high school in 1941.

#17 | POSTED BY TOR AT 2021-10-06 06:05 PM | FLAG:

He's one of the old gods or something ancient then! You're just going to discount their warning?!?

It's fine. The mini Cthulhus we injected in everyone will do their work either way. The old ones will awaken

Lmao, this is just a feel good story. Don't mind it a bit

5 | POSTED BY TWINPAC AT 2021-10-06 04:55 PM | FLAG:

Not bad advice - and I may talk to my doctor. But I may be okay. I was honestly just hoping for more feedback from the group here, since it's small but from all over and all walks of life - wondered how everyone else reacted. But as I said, I may be okay by the booster. The truth is I lied a little on my vaccine paperwork. You weren't supposed to have had Covid in the last 90 days, but I had had it about 45 days before.

I work in a skilled nursing facility though, long term care. Nothing glamorous, but I love the field and keep going up in it, currently one of the department heads in my company and Covid killed almost 1/5 of our residents. I've never seen anything so horrible or tragic in my life. Families outside a window, while a hospice priest I had to rapid test and help gown, mask, faceshield, and glove up was giving last rights to a patient who couldn't breathe on 10 lpm of O2 and the hospitals could do nothing for tragic. I was taking no chances with natural immunity alone after that.

Incidentally, I wasn't the only one to respond like that. Half our management team was out that day with the same symptoms. Basically, all of us who'd had to be out on the floor assisting the bare bones of what was left of our staff - sometimes up to 16 to 20 hours a day. We couldn't come to anything conclusive, but best we could come up with was maybe they had caught Covid too, but were asymptomatic or low enough viral load to not show up on a test (we were testing weekly) or drew false negatives, and that was why we all got hit so hard.

So that's why I was throwing that out here. Did everyone else on this site get no side effects? And honestly, I don't care either way, after that experience, I'll take a ------ day on the couch to not bring the virus in to an elderly population and see that happen again. But I'm definitely curious.

It was always the case that right wing demagogues were not the source of the problem, but the expression of it.

In the case of the familiar one, Trump was not intellectually intelligent, but somehow he was brilliant at identifying problems. He just always seemed to take the wrong solution. A lot of populist rage? Weaponize it instead of harness for political capital to make meaningful change. Immigration problem? Build a wall instead of expand our institutions that could document, background check, and process them in. Got a trade deficit? Put tariffs on imports and make everything more expensive for businesses and consumers instead of subsidize industry we wish to build. I will never figure out how he was simultaneously so adept and yet inept at that. But the rage and all the other issues he still managed to tap into, and they have already left his control even. Was never more clear than the moment he told a rally to get the vaccine, and they booed even him.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!

If done, this absolutely WILL bite democrats in the ass. I'm thinking it's virtually inevitable that repubs will take back Congress next year. Not too dangerous then, Biden will have veto powers - but if 2024 brings a Republican president and congress with no filibuster ... . and it's not impossible said president could be Trump again. Unlikely, but not impossible.

A wine drinking trialthalon running bisexual isn't going to think like most people.

Even in Arizona.

#17 | POSTED BY TOR AT 2021-10-05 07:01 PM | FLAG:

Can we stop using that description of her? It keeps making me forgive her for everything

I'll get mine - probably Moderna again - as soon as it opens to frontline workers and we receive them.

Although holy crap, if it goes anything like my second shot, I'm pre-planning PTO for the following day or 2. My second shot left me with a 102 degree fever, chills, muscle aches, and joint aches so bad I suddenly became aware of joints I've never thought of in my life. For god's sake, there are joints around the metatarsals in your feet that hurt when I stood up that night. And the fatigue lasted through the day after that. Simply spent the day after the shot in sweats and a hoody under 2 blankets on the couch, dreading the moments I had to get up and use the bathroom feeling like a 90 year old man walking out in a blizzard. I'm aware how lucky I am to say it, but to be a bit flippant - damn, I'd rather have had Covid again. That only hurt my cooking since I couldn't smell crap lol.

But I'll get it. I don't ever want to see anything like 2020 in long term care again.

On a side note, to this day I wonder if my reaction to the vaccine was that extreme simply because I'd had Covid before.

The CIA is one of the shadiest, most corrupt, destructive agencies in human history. It's a good start. How do we lose the rest?

Why would someone damage a statue erected to bring attention to our ongoing problems with drug overdose?

It's endemic now, and will continue to specialize itself to be more successful at infecting the vaccinated. Just evolution. We either have to get used to getting boosters tweaked to the new variant a couple times a year, or develop a wholly better vaccine.

The vaccines were an amazing development, but I don't exactly trust Big Pharma to go for the latter when they can keep selling the former. My biggest hope at this point is in some of the articles about people who have had both vaccine and infection have something of a turbocharged immunity, in which case endemic or not, the virus might run into a wall once everyone has both had it and been vaccinated. Or Herman Cained their way out.

I second that! Besides, some part of me has always felt that if you're going to eat meat, you should know the cost of it. We're so disassociated from nature. The other part is that the worst damages to the environment from farming come from the animal side of it. Though I have issues with our monoculture model and anything that requires Monsanto as well, but that's a whole other discussion. But hunting can be managed in a manner which is at times even helpful to the environment. More fishing than hunting, (same principle) but the lionfish for example.

It is one of the saddest things I have ever witnessed that these vaccines became politicized.

I swear both sides just make the other one dig in harder and dumber. No false equivalence, the (mostly) right wing side is by far the most harmful of the 2.

Over on the right wing side you have idiots literally willing to risk dying to prove ... I'm actually not sure what they're trying to prove. Just that they are idiots and are willing to risk dying for it.

On the left, a lot of magical thinking and denial - somehow the vaccine is both totally effective, which you're not allowed to question, but completely ineffective unless everyone complies, because one unvaccinated could give it to everyone. So ... not that effective? The truth is a little in between. No vaccine is 100% effective, hence the drive for herd immunity, but looking at highly vaccinated nations like Israel and Singapore, it's entirely possible this virus is simply endemic at this point and even 100% compliance will not achieve herd immunity. The effectiveness of this vaccine just does not rate up there with the effectiveness of examples like measles, with its 97% effectiveness that lasts years or decades. So every time the left goes on about how effective this vaccine is, the right cherry picks a piece of news about yet another person catching Covid while fully vaccinated, or in a few, but a growing number of cases, dying from it despite being fully vaccinated. This just erodes the left's credibility, who get mad and blame the unvaccinated for that person catching it, even though they could have gotten it from someone vaccinated, and everyone just keeps getting madder at each other and digging in harder.

I still wouldn't worry too much about the left's position on that - it's not exactly harmful - but I fear it breeds a false sense of security. I'd much rather see mandated daily *testing* for Covid in health care than mandated vaccines, for instance. Yeah, it's LESS likely - but the truth is the vaccine does work to reduce symptoms and mortality - so how do I know that the nurse standing next to me complaining about her allergies isn't actually experiencing reduced Covid symptoms, and about to go infect someone immune compromised? You can fire every last unvaccinated, and yet that remains a risk. TEST.

As for the right, I just don't know. Keep educating. And while I respect the right of adults to be stupid with their own life, I don't respect their right to subject children to that. The one mandate I can get totally behind is vaccinating children the instant the vaccine is approved.

In humans, I most like the theory that consciousness is simply a recursive loop that happens when we attempt to perceive our own perception. The subconscious therefore is simply whatever routines we have running in the background. So in theory, yes? Whatever programs they have suspended in RAM to get back to?

Don't really know more than anyone else - I think the biggest hurdle to AI is programming it with any sort of drive or motivation of its own. Or maybe it, just finding a machine corollary of dopamine. How do you create a system of reward for that which needs nothing but to not have its power cord pulled?

PS, if you get bad symptoms obviously get to a hospital! That was just the best reasoning I could come up with back a year ago before there was a vaccine, hoping to keep symptoms from getting bad. And hey, it still makes more sense than horse dewormer lol.

And if you haven't been vaccinated, no matter how bad it gets, don't go to a hospital. Definitely try the horse dewormer.

The politicization truly has done wonders for it. The party of personal responsibility continues to age that old term like sour milk.

In an ordinary world you'd expect republicans doing all they could to assure they had first access to the vaccine and forget the poor, while a few crazed vegan lefties screamed about big pharma and refused the vaccine. I can't make heads or tails of it anymore. Nobody even cares about what their preferred party (supposedly) stands for, just that they stand against the other party. Even if it completely flip flops with every administration.

I support this! You don't want the vaccine, don't ask for treatment either, unless you have a legitimate medical excuse for not having one - which would pretty much only be limited to an ingredient in the vaccine causing anaphylactic shock.

That said, but when I got Covid before the vaccine was out, I figured I was (somewhat lol) still young enough and keep myself in good enough shape I was more worried about some of the weirder symptoms people get, like blood clots leading to strokes, pulmonary embolism, etc and not so much whether my immune system could handle it as whether it would go too far, hitting the whole cytokine storm point. Took absurd levels of vitamin D, omega 3's and a baby aspirin or 2 a day from the moment I thought I might have been exposed, just in hopes that would at least limit inflammation and chance of clots. Along with the usual multi vitamins, high levels of zinc and C and whatnot. My only symptom ended up being a lost sense of smell for 5 days.

I'm no doctor, definitely can't recommend the baby aspirin to just anyone without saying talk to your Dr, and Covid symptoms are so all over the place one anecdotal case is utterly useless - but I did pull through just fine and quickly, so maybe food for thought if anyone gets a breakthrough case.

Although after having had Covid and the vaccine, if I get a breakthrough case I'm going to be sooooooo pissed.

Well, it's slower than "Giant meteor 2020" as preferred candidate, but I guess there is still hope

Trump was what the left got for running Hillary, for turning their backs on progressives under Obama.

Hillary crying about losing not being fair and all Russian collusion after herself colluding with the DNC to oust Bernie set the stage for Trump's own "stolen election" playbook.

Politics has been a giant flying crapnado of the elites saying F their constituents and only paying lip service to them during campaign time for far too long, and now everything is coming undone.

We can either return to the circular firing squad and business as usual while the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the ability to go between stratifies itself out of existence, or admit our mistakes and learn from them.