OT: Corona virus

[BBfanboy]

ORIGINAL: obvert

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

The idea of science not being a "democracy" - of respecting sincerely held minority views - is a noble one seldom accomplished. We don't want to get into climate change here, as that's off-topic and fairly incendiary, but climate-change "skeptics" are not respected. The majority feel that the science is settled and that the matter is too critical to entertain dissenting views. So the skeptics are marginalized, denied tenure, picked on, scorned, etc. by their comrades. There are other fields with similar patterns too. We would do well to learn to tolerate and accommodate but it's hard to avoid going down the "tyranny of the majority" pathway.

Dan, you just brought in climate change to make a point that doesn't necessarily need that to make it.

We had a long off forum discussion about climate change and I checked every single claim you made about those scientists being "mistreated." What I found was that many were proven to be incorrect in their findings by later studies, but held onto their thesis long after they were obsolete. Others had funding from think tanks with anti-climate change agendas and produced science that supported the goals of the institutions paying their wages. Some others had claims that showed very interesting findings, but that didn't necessarily debunk prevailing climate change consensus, and yet they and others claimed that they did.

So maybe keep climate change out to his thread please. No need to go there.

Yes - Exxon Mobil created a company to research climate issues and guess what they found?
OTOH, some of the climate change projections are a bit too dire, the timeline too short - sort of like the COVID projections. There is room for discussion but until we get better at converting the scientific facts into models that are much more accurate, there will never be agreement. For every time there is an "I told you so" incident on one side, there is still an exception supporting the other side. Nobody gets a win in the debate.

[RangerJoe]

How bubonic plague has helped Russia fight the coronavirus
The New York Times Apr 16, 2020

Russia maintains 13 antiplague centers, from the Far East to the Caucasus Mountains, five plague research institutes and multiple field stations. In March, the authorities moved new laboratory equipment into the antiplague center in Moscow to expand its ability to test for coronavirus.

The Microbe institute, originally dedicated wholly to bubonic plague but later expanded to tackle other infections such as cholera, yellow fever, anthrax and tularemia, models the spread of the coronavirus.

Starting in January, directors of antiplague centers in the Eurasian Economic Union, the Moscow-led trade alliance of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia, held conference calls about the coronavirus. And a plague institute in Odessa, Ukraine, is among agencies responding to the coronavirus there, officials said.

“The very fact that Russia and the other former Soviet states are, exactly, former Soviet states means a common legacy,” in health care, said Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. A legacy of focus on epidemics helped, he said. Soviet health care had haphazard success at treating individuals but “could respond like the military to epidemics,” he noted.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavi ... story.html

They stopped the spread of bubonic plague so it only got the initial victim.

[HansBolter]

ORIGINAL: obvert

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

The idea of science not being a "democracy" - of respecting sincerely held minority views - is a noble one seldom accomplished. We don't want to get into climate change here, as that's off-topic and fairly incendiary, but climate-change "skeptics" are not respected. The majority feel that the science is settled and that the matter is too critical to entertain dissenting views. So the skeptics are marginalized, denied tenure, picked on, scorned, etc. by their comrades. There are other fields with similar patterns too. We would do well to learn to tolerate and accommodate but it's hard to avoid going down the "tyranny of the majority" pathway.

Dan, you just brought in climate change to make a point that doesn't necessarily need that to make it.

We had a long off forum discussion about climate change and I checked every single claim you made about those scientists being "mistreated." What I found was that many were proven to be incorrect in their findings by later studies, but held onto their thesis long after they were obsolete. Others had funding from think tanks with anti-climate change agendas and produced science that supported the goals of the institutions paying their wages. Some others had claims that showed very interesting findings, but that didn't necessarily debunk prevailing climate change consensus, and yet they and others claimed that they did.

So maybe keep climate change out to his thread please. No need to go there.

Same conditions apply to cosmology.
Try debunking the documented fact that dissenters are ostracized, denied tenure and denied time on research grade telescopes.
The existence of Big Science shutting out dissent is far too well documented.

And YES, it applies to global warming come climate change since the whole global warming thing didn't work out too well for the doomsayers.

[HansBolter]

Now for something a bit light hearted:

Twitter Offers Medical Degrees So You Can Express Ignorant Opinions With Authority [Satire]

https://www.dailywire.com/news/twitter- ... ity-satire

[RangerJoe]

Methinks some people are tired of staying at home:

Southern Illinois judge temporarily blocks Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s stay-at-home order from applying to Republican state lawmaker who sued
Apr 28, 2020

Political divisions over Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s statewide stay-at-home restrictions were on full display Monday, as a judge issued a temporary injunction allowing a Republican legislator to disregard the order, a decision Pritzker quickly denounced while forcefully defending his actions to fight the coronavirus pandemic.

The ruling by Clay County Circuit Court Judge Michael McHaney came in a lawsuit filed by Rep. Darren Bailey that challenged Pritzker’s authority to extend his stay-at-home order beyond the initial 30 days under the state’s Emergency Management Act.

While the ruling applied only to Bailey, it could open the door for other Illinois residents to seek similar relief from the stay-at-home order, with McHaney’s injunction as a justification.

In seeking the injunction, Bailey said he is “irreparably harmed each day he is subjected to” Pritzker’s executive order, and asked the judge to enjoin the governor or anyone under his authority from enforcing it against him.

McHaney’s ruling said Pritzker was prohibited “from in any way enforcing the March 20 executive order against Darren Bailey forcing him to isolate and quarantine in his home,” or any subsequent orders that would do the same.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavi ... &nt=ticker

[RangerJoe]

ORIGINAL: HansBolter

Now for something a bit light hearted:

Twitter Offers Medical Degrees So You Can Express Ignorant Opinions With Authority [Satire]

https://www.dailywire.com/news/twitter- ... ity-satire

List of animals with fraudulent diplomas

This list of animals with fraudulent diplomas includes nonhuman animals who have been submitted as applicants to suspected diploma mills. On occasion, they have been admitted and granted a degree, as reported in reliable sources. Animals are often used as a device to clearly demonstrate the lax standards of the awarding institutions. In one case, a cat's degree helped lead to a successful fraud prosecution against the institution that had issued it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_a ... t_diplomas

[Chickenboy]

ORIGINAL: BBfanboy
Not to mention all the people who are going to swallow copper pennies (which are mostly steel)

They're mostly Zinc. Big problems with zinc toxicosis from waterfowl that ingest them.

[BBfanboy]

ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake

I found my long-lost twin.

Probably it is not permitted to post American Spectator here...but...[:)]

https://spectator.org/world-war-iii-is- ... s-winning/

For the last few years China and the United States have been at war. A polite war, but a war for world leadership nonetheless. Until recently, the combat was economic. The U.S. imposed tariffs — an 18th-century technology — and the Chinese responded with COVID-19, a 21st-century technology that decimated our economy. They won.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, 40 percent of the U.S. economy will be destroyed — as well as over 200,000 deaths worldwide and 50,000 in the U.S. to date and counting. The latest is that meat-packing plants are closing to avoid spreading the virus, which may lead to food shortages.

There is no question that China did this to us and our economy. Some people still want to believe that it was an accident or an innocent mistake. That is naïve, but more important, irrelevant. The adverse effect on our people and our economy is no less real even if we can’t prove that the Chinese did it on purpose.

It cannot be denied that the Chinese government set loose the COVID-19 coronavirus on the rest of the world and that the U.S. and our NATO allies have been especially hard hit. It appears at present that there will be no adverse consequences for them — with the possible exception of paying $30 million more to support their friends at the World Health Organization to replace the contribution that the U.S. suspended. What a pitiful response!


China has shown the U.S. and the rest of the world who is boss by demonstrating what it can do with a virus. U.S. strategic doctrine calls for the U.S. to retaliate with nuclear weapons if we are subject to an attack by biological or chemical weapons of mass destruction. That strategy — if one can dignify it by using that term — is both impractical and antiquated; it is mired in cold war thinking from the nuclear standoff of the 1960s. Who could possibly imagine that a U.S. nuclear strike on the Chinese people in retaliation for a pandemic their government chose not to prevent is realistic — or desirable? No, the Chinese government has figured out how to attack in a way that gives plausible deniability, and consequently there will be no retaliation.

The lesson from World War II is that the major country that is least damaged by the carnage emerges as the new world leader. In 1945, that was the United States; today it is China. Whether they did this to the rest of the world on purpose or it just happened because they didn’t bother to prevent transmission to the rest of the world is largely irrelevant to assessing the consequences for the new world order. The “Chinese century” has begun.

True, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) have proposed a bill to set loose on China our equivalent of their virus: hordes of American trial lawyers bringing lawsuits in U.S. courts. That won’t pass — and if it did, China wouldn’t accept the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts or pay. What could show more clearly how unprepared we are intellectually to respond to an attack of this type than that the only thing we can think of to do about it is to sue the pandemic’s creators.

This is one of the few major attacks in history that was so brilliantly done — intentionally or not — that no one will counterattack. The only thing that comes to mind is the British breaking the German codes in World War II so that they could redirect the radio targeting beams and German bombers would drop their bombs in empty fields rather than over London.

You have to hand it to them: China out-thought us. They are taking credit worldwide for cures and humanitarian aid for a virus that they set loose on the world.

President Trump says he “is not happy” with China. Whoop-de-doo. They must be shaking in their boots. China is supposed to buy $250 billion of our products, and Trump is pleading with them to live up to their bargain, perhaps because he sees that as crucial to his prospects for reelection.


Imagine that the roles were reversed and we had killed 50,000 Chinese citizens with nuclear or conventional kinetic weapons instead of a naturally occurring virus. What would the response have been?

We are fighting a 21st-century enemy with 20th-century weapons. No wonder that they are winning.

I highly doubt the Chinese deliberately did anything to ensure the virus got going in the US - the lack of response to the oncoming problem is what got it started. Much of that is inherent in having a global economy where travel and shipment of goods are required to keep it going. We could have dealt with it by health screening measures à la Singapore, but we didn't study it enough to know how dangerous it was going to be. A simple misjudgment. (If 3M company could see what was happening in China and ramp up mask production well before government authorities sounded an alarm, there was intel out there about how bad it could get).

What the Chinese have done is look at the long haul - decade to a century down the road and imagined what they have to do to make progress. That doesn't mean sabotaging other countries - it just means building an economic infrastructure that fits with what the world wants/needs. The only thing sinister I have seen is the way the Silk Road project has used the greed of third world leaders to shackle their countries with loan debts that they can't handle. Blame the leaders of those countries. (afterthought - the Spratly Islands gambit is another sinister attempt to take control of a whole Sea and all the oil that might lie under it.)

And why shouldn't China be a major player on the world stage? It has the largest population and for a couple of hundred years the West exploited their military advantage to plunder China and cause internal divisions to keep it weak. They are obviously determined to change that. I am no fan of Communist ideology or state repression of the people but I suspect that opening the economic doors will lead to a greater role of the people in their government. I am more concerned about the destruction/neutering of US institutions that are necessary to ensure the government follows the Constitution to the letter.

[geofflambert]

.

[Cap Mandrake]

Nobody in the West invented the "internal divisions" in China.

Of course, I don't really believe the CCP intentionally released the Wuhan Flu either. Let's just say they "insufficiently energetic" in their attempt to prevent its international spread.

[RangerJoe]

ORIGINAL: HansBolter

ORIGINAL: obvert

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

The idea of science not being a "democracy" - of respecting sincerely held minority views - is a noble one seldom accomplished. We don't want to get into climate change here, as that's off-topic and fairly incendiary, but climate-change "skeptics" are not respected. The majority feel that the science is settled and that the matter is too critical to entertain dissenting views. So the skeptics are marginalized, denied tenure, picked on, scorned, etc. by their comrades. There are other fields with similar patterns too. We would do well to learn to tolerate and accommodate but it's hard to avoid going down the "tyranny of the majority" pathway.

Dan, you just brought in climate change to make a point that doesn't necessarily need that to make it.

We had a long off forum discussion about climate change and I checked every single claim you made about those scientists being "mistreated." What I found was that many were proven to be incorrect in their findings by later studies, but held onto their thesis long after they were obsolete. Others had funding from think tanks with anti-climate change agendas and produced science that supported the goals of the institutions paying their wages. Some others had claims that showed very interesting findings, but that didn't necessarily debunk prevailing climate change consensus, and yet they and others claimed that they did.

So maybe keep climate change out to his thread please. No need to go there.

Same conditions apply to cosmology.
Try debunking the documented fact that dissenters are ostracized, denied tenure and denied time on research grade telescopes.
The existence of Big Science shutting out dissent is far too well documented.

And YES, it applies to global warming come climate change since the whole global warming thing didn't work out too well for the doomsayers.

In the 1920's, there was talk of all the Arctic ice melting and the polar bears drowning. Then in the 1930's came 7 colder than normal winters in Europe and some "bright" people figured that the winter of 1941-42 was due to be a warm one. That is why Germany did not send enough cold weather equipment and supplies to the Eastern Front. In the 1970's, Buffalo NY had 100+ straight days of snow. The National Guard was called out and they still could not handle all of the snow. There was talk of entering another Ice Age . . .

[RangerJoe]

ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake

Nobody in the West invented the "internal divisions" in China.

Of course, I don't really believe the CCP intentionally released the Wuhan Flu either. Let's just say they "insufficiently energetic" in their attempt to prevent its international spread.

Lack of action is, in and of itself, an action.

The CCP's failure to take proper initial action made it much worse.

[Canoerebel]

New York reporting 243 deaths, which is another sharp decline (caveat: this may be an interim tally, with more to come).

New Jersey up sharply today, from about 100 to about 400.

[obvert]

ORIGINAL: BBfanboy

And why shouldn't China be a major player on the world stage? It has the largest population and for a couple of hundred years the West exploited their military advantage to plunder China and cause internal divisions to keep it weak. They are obviously determined to change that. I am no fan of Communist ideology or state repression of the people but I suspect that opening the economic doors will lead to a greater role of the people in their government. I am more concerned about the destruction/neutering of US institutions that are necessary to ensure the government follows the Constitution to the letter.

Good points. Chinese you talk to will certainly being up the point on European colonialism. China had the largest estimated GDP in the world right up until the opium wars against Britain.

The human rights abuses, repression of their own and the other countries now wiithin their Imperial sphere are very concerning though. Neither the Uigers nor the Tibetans probably think China “deserves” a bigger place on the world stage due to its historical suppression.

[Canoerebel]

Something's toying with your spelling. [:)]

[mind_messing]

ORIGINAL: BBfanboy

ORIGINAL: obvert

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

The idea of science not being a "democracy" - of respecting sincerely held minority views - is a noble one seldom accomplished. We don't want to get into climate change here, as that's off-topic and fairly incendiary, but climate-change "skeptics" are not respected. The majority feel that the science is settled and that the matter is too critical to entertain dissenting views. So the skeptics are marginalized, denied tenure, picked on, scorned, etc. by their comrades. There are other fields with similar patterns too. We would do well to learn to tolerate and accommodate but it's hard to avoid going down the "tyranny of the majority" pathway.

Dan, you just brought in climate change to make a point that doesn't necessarily need that to make it.

We had a long off forum discussion about climate change and I checked every single claim you made about those scientists being "mistreated." What I found was that many were proven to be incorrect in their findings by later studies, but held onto their thesis long after they were obsolete. Others had funding from think tanks with anti-climate change agendas and produced science that supported the goals of the institutions paying their wages. Some others had claims that showed very interesting findings, but that didn't necessarily debunk prevailing climate change consensus, and yet they and others claimed that they did.

So maybe keep climate change out to his thread please. No need to go there.

Yes - Exxon Mobil created a company to research climate issues and guess what they found?
OTOH, some of the climate change projections are a bit too dire, the timeline too short - sort of like the COVID projections. There is room for discussion but until we get better at converting the scientific facts into models that are much more accurate, there will never be agreement. For every time there is an "I told you so" incident on one side, there is still an exception supporting the other side. Nobody gets a win in the debate.

You can find flaws with specific studies. The body of evidence overwhelmingly suggests that it is an ever-increasing problem.

[Canoerebel]

Denmark and Austria began easing countermeasures about 12 days ago. I haven't heard anything since then. Presumably, that means there haven't been major flare ups, to this point.

[Lowpe]

ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake

Nobody in the West invented the "internal divisions" in China.

Of course, I don't really believe the CCP intentionally released the Wuhan Flu either. Let's just say they "insufficiently energetic" in their attempt to prevent its international spread.

As I understand it, a common practice is for lab workers to sell animals to the meat market for some spare coin once the tests are done.

I also understand they banned travel in China but allowed foreign travel (in the areas hit by the Wuhan Flu).

[MakeeLearn]

Michigan Democrat Gov Whitmer Has Emergency Powers Repealed by
State Legislature Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s emergency powers reigned in after triggering statewide unrest
25th April 2020

https://neonnettle.com/news/11095-michi ... egislature


"Michigan's Democrat governor, Gretchen Whitmer, has had her emergency coronavirus crisis powers repealed after her overreaching stay-at-home order triggered statewide unrest.

The GOP-controlled Michigan legislature took steps to reign in Gov. Whitmer’s emergency powers on Friday. The state legislature was scheduled to reconvene to review Whitmer’s actions on Friday, Speaker of the House Lee Chatfield announced on Thursday.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its spread through Detroit, a hotspot for the virus, Michigan has enacted some of the harshest emergency regulations."

[Cap Mandrake]

Rural Michigan doesn't have much in common with Detroit.The "UP" isn't even connected by land.