Random Rant Thread

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Basically liberals don't know how much Trump is actually liked by many Americans, and right-wingers don't know how much Trump is hated by many Americans.

Both are problems, but the latter is pathologically ignorant; They tend to be genuinely unaware of the extent to which Donald is absolutely hated by tens of millions of people, believe it or not.

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Robert Fisk, one of the most well known war reporters, died last month. With his criticism of the mighty he made many enemies and non surprisingly there was never a lack of scorn and hostility among other journalists toward him.

So some Guardian journalists of course couldn't resist to make a mockery of any upright stance the paper may have once had.

Jessica Elgot praised big time some standard smear piece from some hack (who has a great resume of working for Daily Mail and Erdogans propaganda channel TRT world).
Jason Burke then claimed he had the smoking gun to prove Fisk makes stories up. Then somebody looked up Fisks article and it turns out Burke made just up what Fisk wrote.

And of course they couldn't resist the trick for believability to pretend that they were big admirers of Fisk and are now so shocked he's in their propaganda a fraudster. To which former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook of course objected they were already hostile towards Fisk when he worked there

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The Guardian has Luke Harding in charge of the Russia beat. That should tell you all you need to know about the paper's priority. It's the narrative, not facts.

I'm a subscriber, but tend to skip the stories they publish on international affairs. Too many low-quality hack jobs, and it's particularly glaring in the Guardian's case as they often don't seem to understand that the UK no longer really... matters much.

Basically, becoming a Guardian correspondent means denigrating Robert Fisk and others at cocktail parties. Many of them grew up reading his books as teens, but you are supposed to "graduate from the Fiskian naivete as an adult," you know. So they hide their copies of Pity the Nation - an unparalleled masterpiece that I would recommend to everyone on this planet - behind the closet. You can't have that in the background during your video conference/TV interview!

Was Fisk always right? No. He was often wrong. He saw the US at the root of everything, which sometimes led to gross exaggerations, and giving an undeserved pass to local bad actors. But so what? He was almost always right on the big picture.

If you cover the Middle East, and don't understand Fisk's motivations and passion, you are heartless. You just don't care.

The world will miss him.

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The force of history suddenly turns to you and puts you forcibly into a spotlight. How would you perform if that ever happened to you?

Anthony Fauci is handling it pretty well. Very powerful deliverance. A man of the moment.

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Dr. Fauci is 79. Joe Biden is 78. Donald Trump is 74.

I guess we just have to accept that our parents will continue to rule us all for years to come.

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You can tell from the Swedish government's words and attitude that Pfizer and Moderna finishing Phase 3 trials so soon with the whopping 95% efficacy was by far the worst news for them this year, worse than tons of elderly people dying at nursing homes. It's pretty obvious.

And that says all, really. You are looking at people who lost a huge bet.

I suspect that they will manage to keep the fatalities relatively low (i.e. high, but not catastrophically so) in the end. It's a very wealthy country with good infrastructure. Bad policies can be overcome with great social cohesion, and Stockholm is no Brussels.

But the international PR damage is simply unfathomable.

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Moderna released the trial data. Some key takeaways:


Covid-19 cases:

185/196 placebo group
11/196 vaccine group

Of these:

30/196 were severe Covid-19 cases, with one of them dead

30/30 placebo group
0/30 vaccine group (!)

"Efficacy was consistent across age, race and ethnicity, and gender demographics"

Adverse reactions:

pain/redness at injection site
fatigue
headache
myalgia (muscle ache)
arthralgia (joint pain)

Some caveats (obvious ones):

How long does immunity lasts?

Does it affect/stop transmissions?

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This is fucking bizarre.

www.tv4play.se/program/nyhetsmorgon/13306257

Not only Tegnell, but also his flunkies.

Do they Dear-Our-Leader their state epidemiologists like this in Norway and Finland too? I suspect not. Certainly not in Japan either. Hell, do Norwegians and Finns even know who their top epidemiologists are?

You put Norway and Finland together, and you'll get a country actually bigger than Sweden. And their combined fatality figure so far is 700-750, whereas Sweden's is about that x 10.

Yet it's Tegnell that is somehow a superstar. Well, actually that's not really surprising at all, it can be easily explained on the group psychology terms, but shit like this makes me think of a country that is about to lose a war.

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I agree with Scott Gottlieb that after this winter surge at least 30% of Americans will have been infected (including a huge number of extremely low-level asymptomatic infections with weak antibodies, of course). It's very clearly that kind of a scale. SARS-CoV-2 is burning through various parts of the country. The spread has significantly slowed down in the Midwest, but it will basically plateau because of the addition of cases after Thanksgiving.

I don't know what will happen to the hospitals. I really don't know.

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It's not hyperbole to say this man has killed and will continue to kill a huge number of Americans (and even non-Americans).

Too little too late. Damage has been done.

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It would be nice if Stanford threw the Hoover Institute under the bus while we are at it, but they will never do that to their donation tool. It's purely about $.

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You're a very conservative pro-Trump Republican governor of a traditionally Republican state, who even did Trump a favor in the middle of a huge state-wide Covid-19 epidemic in the summer, who was brown-nosey enough to change his WH ringtone to "Hail to The Chief," yet having the audacity of... following the state law makes you a Soros puppet in the eyes of Trumpians.

You know I've been a fierce anti-Russiagater. I've been hurt by liberals. But you can't both-sides this. This is Rwanda-level mass delusion and insanity, even though not surprising at all.

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And:

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Coming to EU soon too. Possibly by the end of December.

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This is literally the most amazing thing that I've ever seen on Twitter.

So talented.

(Kenneth Copeland is a super-wealthy televangelist con artist in Texas, someone I'm very familiar with)