Random Rant Thread

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At least Europe has already taken action.

The Trump administration has done nothing. Zero.

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Have you ever wondered why, when I mentioned American party operatives/campaign staffers in this thread, an overwhelming majority of them were Republican, even though I'm closer to Democrats?

This is the reason (it's a thread).

The information that I can get from those Democrats is usually garbage. Since 2004, I've made it a rule to trust Republicans off the record a lot more than their Democratic counterparts on all election matters. Much of the stuff you read in this thread comes from them.

That's why I always emphasize the power of the Republican campaign machinery. Trump would've been nowhere without it, which is something that man doesn't and will never understand.

Anyway, it kind of depends on which state, but generally speaking, Democrats can't be trusted on these things whether on or off the record. They sound clueless, and DO turn out clueless far too often. I'm glad that I didn't take seriously what a Democratic staffer in Texas told me a few weeks ago. I ALMOST bought it, but a Republican gave me a dose of reality soon after. Needless to say the latter turned out right.

So, AOC is right.

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I gotta add one thing, though: The Democrats who are familiar with the unions and their politics are usually a LOT more trustworthy and insightful on elections than the other kinds of Dems.

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This is the spirit.

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The data show the Pfizer vaccine 90% effective after Phase 3 trial.

This beats ALL expectations. Most of the people that I know were talking about 60-70% at best. There must be something about coronaviruses that makes vaccination easy compared to influenza.

EDIT/correction: MORE THAN 90%. Impossible with influenza vaccines even with the matching strains. Remarkable.

I'd expect most other vaccines to be very effective too. This is extremely good news. 90+% puts us into the eradication territory instead of the mitigation one.

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You don't know how nervous I've been for weeks about the Phase 3 data on efficacy. There was a possibility that it might turn out to be as low as 30%. Unlikely, but possible. There were rumors that things were going pretty good, but they were just, you know, rumors.

This news makes me feel extremely... relieved.

We are on the path to normalcy, folks. And that's EXACTLY why we should save as many lives as possible now.

I won't list all the caveats here. The vaccine won't "cure" you, nor will it exterminate the viruses. There are things that we still don't know, and I suspect we will definitely need other kinds of vaccines too anyway. Most importantly, this particular Pfizer vaccine is very hard to mass produce and distribute. Perhaps THE most "cumbersome" one among the good vaccine candidates. Other companies/labs are working on easier-to-store, easier-to-make, one-shot vaccines. Pfizer focused very much on efficacy first and foremost.

And this won't eliminate the necessity of better therapeutics and treatment at all. Like I said many times, good vaccines alone cannot end the pandemic.

Given all that, this is still huge.

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BTW, it's very clear that Trump's share of the GOP vote increased from 2016.

So, if you donated to The Lincoln Project/Republicans Against Donald Trump, you basically paid for the cool ads that they made, and that's about it.

And they are still at it, asking for donations. For what?

Just thank them for the cool anti-Trump ads, and ignore them.

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Whenever I talk about vaccines, I realize that people tend to have some fundamental misunderstanding and unrealistic expectations of them.

No, it's not going to be even remotely close to "ending the pandemic" this year or even early next year. Just no.

The Pfizer data is huge news, but I suppose I must strike the right balance there. People's tendency and willingness to believe so lazily in a magic bullet is kind of amazing.

In case you are somehow still wondering, no, you won't have regular Christmas this year. It's not going to happen. Not in the US, not in Europe, not in Asia.

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I think I said this before, but the so-called "Swedish approach," which doesn't necessarily mean what Sweden actually did, had this tacit assumption that effective vaccines/killer therapeutics were several years away.

Pfizer's Phase 3 data fatally damage that assumption. I think the jury is pretty much in now: It was a wrong approach.

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When will they realize that Fox News doesn't dictate the right-wing discourse anymore?

It's cool and nice that Murdoch is trying to diffuse the situation. But on Zuckerberg's platform, which is by far the biggest right-wing echo chamber today, half of the most linked stories are about the Historic Election Fraud By Evil Democrats.

Congrats, America. You let that philistine idiot ruin the foundation of your country. You can't say that I didn't warn you.

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As we are heading into the winter season, unfortunately we must assume that we are going to lose a lot of people over the next few months and beyond. It's going to be a lot of people, a hell of a lot more than I thought. It's not just Europe and the Americas. It's probably global, although the scales may vary. Only a handful of countries, like Taiwan, New Zealand and a few others, will be able to keep it under control.

This thing is probably seasonal. It will try to come back once or twice a year. Yes, we will get effective vaccines. But we don't know for how long those first vaccine candidates will work.

I don't think this is going to "end" like that. I think these viruses will stick around, pretty much permanently.

This pandemic will profoundly change our society, perhaps for the better. We'll take viral diseases a lot more seriously. It's senseless that we basically ignored the death tolls that the flu caused every year. Not at this pace, but still a lot of people die of influenza. How many of you took a flu shot last year?

We'll take ventilation a lot more seriously. We'll take basic hygiene a lot more seriously. And we will normalize mask-wearing to some degree. At least it won't mean "I'm weird or sick or dangerous or all the above" in the West.

And if we don't, then, we'll have to start from scratch again when NARS-RV-1 (North American Respiratory Syndrome Rhinovirus 1) hit us in 2023, on top of the same old flu family and mutated SARS-CoV-2.

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This is also huge:

Monoclonals have been believed for a while to work with people with "mild symptoms," which means the drug might be able to significantly reduce hospitalizations.

If bamlanivimab works (Chris Christie took this at the hospital), other monoclonals probably do. The problem is that these drugs are very expensive. They are hard to produce in large volumes too.

But it's important to know there are drugs that can inhibit the symptoms. This may be another game changer.

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Is this deliberate, or are these people simply extremely daft?

Johnson's Biden win tweet contains hidden Trump congratulations
www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/nov/10/johnsons-biden-win-tweet-contains-hidden-trump-congratulations

I'm not kidding when I say Biden really, really doesn't care for Johnson. It's not political gossiping. I'm just stating a fact.

Besides, many Obama staffers down right despised him. I know a few of them. And those people talk to Biden on a regular basis. You know why?

Because many of them are Biden staffers now!

Biden is too busy to care about this kind of crap, but his staffers do check newspapers and other websites every day, including a few of the British ones. They are the ones who draft policies.

Is it possible that those Conservatives are not aware of that for some mysterious reasons? It's hard to believe that, but I guess I shouldn't exclude that possibility given the gross slapstick dark comedy that they have shown over Brexit and Covid-19 and so on.

[gols]

Nov 10, 2020 14:41:50 GMT 1 miscmisc said:

Is it possible that those Conservatives are not aware of that for some mysterious reasons? It's hard to believe that, but I guess I shouldn't exclude that possibility given the gross slapstick dark comedy that they have shown over Brexit and Covid-19 and so on.

They may actually not know. There has been a 'war on the civil service' under Dominic Cummings, so perhaps the people that would know these things are gone or frozen out?

Or, they just think they can bullshit their way past this like with everything else.

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Nov 10, 2020 15:55:32 GMT 1 gols said:

Nov 10, 2020 14:41:50 GMT 1 miscmisc said:

Is it possible that those Conservatives are not aware of that for some mysterious reasons? It's hard to believe that, but I guess I shouldn't exclude that possibility given the gross slapstick dark comedy that they have shown over Brexit and Covid-19 and so on.

They may actually not know. There has been a 'war on the civil service' under Dominic Cummings, so perhaps the people that would know these things are gone or frozen out?

Or, they just think they can bullshit their way past this like with everything else.

But British "spies" are everywhere in D.C.! I mean, not MI6, but there are so many Brits in D.C. that they could claim a tiny colony in some block along Penn Avenue.

I figured out the intellectual level of today's Conservatives when they courted that C-grade grifter Steve Bannon as this towering American right-wing intellectual, but it's just breathtaking.

These people wouldn't be able to run a lemonade stand at a charity event on their own, yet "war on the civil service," right.