TrickstaPriest

This greatly upsets me.

Yuck! And be well.

Unfortunately well water is often contaminated too, and IIRC the map was showing contamination plumes that do not correspond to infrastructure piping. The areas they were checking were for ground water, IIRC, as well as tap water. Tap water as the sole culprit is usually only an issue if the pipes are degrading or additives are a problem, like in Flint. The checks were spurred on by Flint, but included others. Then again, who knows how accurate my memory actually is.

Wow, perhaps your area is just nuts, Badger. My area needs bottled water. The tap water tastes bad, and frankly is untrustworthy. When people were going out and testing water after Flint, Phoenix was one of the areas highlighted as having issues. I can't eat much beef and should be limiting pork as well, but I'm not sure I can survive without pork kielbasa.

Which is why they are pre-gaming so hard on blaming anything/anyone else. Or saying the measures he took were actually a great start. Or any other thing.

And sorry for being so hard on you, Badger. I actively loathe these 'memes' and 'mind bombs'. I won't get on my soapbox, but they have gone from being the one tool the little guy to use against major forces... to one of the most single damaging things I've seen to the well being of democracy.

I would have to have more on-site knowledge, but there's 'risk' and there's risk. Given how strict those protocols can operate, if it was done properly I doubt there was any risk flying someone back. I'm saying that in the strictest sense - I doubt there was more than a 1% chance of it spreading. Contrary to that, having the subject directly here may have made it faster and easier to analyze it. But my knowledge on this subject is limited. I will say people can (and have) found excuse to complain about everything. I've seen people come up with the most 'obvious' complaints about 'insane' protocols that were bald-faced wrong. Flying them back sure sounds 'bone headed' but reality doesn't favor 'sounds like'. 'Sounds like' is just "I don't know enough". Having them here may have let us respond much more effectively in treatment and response. So YMMV, but complaints about science and protocol I take with heavy spoonfuls of salt. I literally had to have a conversation with a friend about why people complaining about 'the government's choices of scientific studies to pay for' had no bearing on reality. His example was something akin to 'why should we pay for studying mayflies'.

Yeah. I'm sorry you have to deal with that. I have seen the mental gymnastics, most of it involves blaming the media. That's not an argument I hold for 1 second, and the sheer impact on the Dow Jones is the best numerical indicator I can point to that "sorry, the President doesn't know what he's doing." If he knew what he was doing, that simply wouldn't have happened that badly. The media isn't great. It never is. But the 'waiting until the last second to do anything' seems to be our calling card.

I think the problem that people aren't quite grasping yet is that this could take a half-year or more to clear up. The people who are ignoring or panicking over that aren't quite grasping that, because containment has failed, this thing is going to at least go through everyone. You aren't likely to die from it. You can lose friends (I know at least four very elderly people directly I am in close contact with and several other friends that, statistically speaking, one will probably lose their lives over this). You could be in traction or isolated for one or two weeks, or unable to work. You could lose hundreds in medical expenses. So I'm not saying panic, but you will know someone who will be struggling from this. You could get a host of other health issues too. I have a reflexive breathing problem where my vocal chords close spontaneously and without warning. It may be related to my (very minor) asthma, but it didn't exist until after I had a relatively minor chest cold for the first time in decades. Barely a couple weeks afterwords my throat closed at work and I couldn't breathe except through a straw. Since then I've had it happen almost half a dozen times. Each time felt like I was going to die. It certainly wasn't there before I got sick, I think I'd have noticed. But I can't imagine what Covid would do to that reflex if I were to get it and then have it go off during the covid symptoms...

My best wishes in this dark time.

This is an excellent point, and kind of core to why I hate his politics in particular. It's inherently destructive to everything but the state. We can argue about a lot of whether other groups do this to some extent or not, but because of the way Trump directly communicates, accuses, and is motivated, it crushes everything else to survive. It has to.

Yeah. It's this that concerns me. The entire attitude of the country has shifted to 'anything goes, give me mine'. Trump is well up there. But the aftereffects of this are going to be very, very bad.

The more I think about this, the more I fear - if he loses - he will immediately go to radio shows and video apps and spend years talking about stolen elections and more-or-less all of his more dangerous rhetoric. Doing what he's been doing as President, but on his preferred 'channels'. Which he may do anyway if he wins, just four years later. I don't know if 'his people' have truly seen how much he is running the country into the ground yet (in my opinion). Do I want him to win? No, definitely not. I just don't think he'll leave quietly if he loses. But maybe I am just feeling like there's no good future for any of us anymore. 😕 edit: I'ma eat some ice cream.

Yeah. Sorry about my comments. I do disagree, but not on the urgency. I just don't see either party advancing critical environmental, healthcare, and surveillance concerns at all.

I run into a fair few that rationalize supporting Biden as giving the best chance to push out Trump. But they haven't talked much about policy, and unfortunately what they have has been complaints about details on Sanders' policies that sound... ill informed. I mean, whether they are right about those details or not, propaganda works. I think I did mention that Australia went from a country that was overwhelmingly concerned about climate change in the early 2000s to one that only has about a third of the country concerned about it. Possibly due to all the money the government spent there on attacking it. edit: to clarify, you can produce propaganda about an idea that's true (or mostly true). It works, and it moves societies.

I wholly agree with this and has been part of my world view for a long, long time. These saving-the-face games in the face of real trouble are not only barbaric, but they are the hallmark of both incompetence and weakness. It's what people do when they literally don't know how to act to resolve a serious situation and are trying to CYA by burning their own raft. It's also the fingerprint of any autocratic regime - it's why most 'experts' and skilled individuals gradually leave the country, it's why their leadership can make disastrous decisions that tank entire industries, and it's why their military struggles with internal conflicts. Yes, contrary to what most military dictatorship propaganda will tell you, their military structure often is rife with internal strife, conflict, and even sabotage. Entirely because they are there for political advancement. Somehow we have taken the stance in fiction that they are in fact as fearsome and strong as they pretend themselves to be.

Be safe out there. I have a coworker out that way as well, it has been nuts as far as I've heard.

Will save this thread just in case.

Yeah, been hearing that the Dems party has had huge issues in consolidating as well. My only problem with that is the Dem party has changed so much issues like healthcare reform or the environment (or the technological spying overreach ingrown into every aspect of our governance) will not be addressed for literal multiple decades. That's going to be way too late on all of those issues.

Yeah. Definitely feels like "whole party vs Bernie" kind of way. In the end, I will have to vote against Trump. But this is more or less how you self-sabotage your own party in the long term. I'm guessing everyone is assuming either short memories or calculating they don't care about the cost.

Nothing wrong with self reflection. Though questions like that are difficult because 'general' dislike is different from 'specific'.

You can espouse this to any cause, but I have been wholly talking about this for some time (wrt politics):

There are a lot of people I know in scientific fields that were really happy with that poor kid who was pirating and sharing scientific research content.

Thanks for sharing this. I find knowing 'playbooks' and 'tactics' in particular to be highly insightful. I always encourage everyone to 'learn the rules', because that's the only way to actually understand what goes on sometimes. That and stats/science.

I'm an avid environmentalist, so... yep. Even outside of our government. Scientists are treated as enemies (or at least foolish) in our very media because of a very heavy religious bias. I can tell you that I worked at places connected to government research (particularly environmental), and its not nearly so strange or suspicious as people like to make it out to be. The real stories behind a lot of sites / work is a lot more banal and less interesting. Lastly, if you want a pretty depressing example of deflection (of responsibility and guilt), watch what's happened to Australia over the last 20 years. A huge concerted effort to propagandize against climate change, followed by what is now a general deflection - 'well we the government can't do anything about it so lets be ready to adapt'. No one mentions that they (the government, the coal lobby) fought to create this situation to begin with.