Random Rant Thread

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I admit I've been a tad too conciliatory to Biden's choices, and that's entirely because Obama's picks were absolutely horrendous in hindsight. He set the bar so low that I was kind of confused, I think.

I mean, Rahm, Sunstein, Orszag. Geithner. Timothy fucking Geithner, the Wall Street mole who single-handedly ruined Obama's first term. Obama won the election with the slogan "the Audacity of Hope." And then he had to pick Geithner.

So, yeah, that's just too low a bar. We should demand more from Biden.

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You libs all pretend to be the Pragmatic Adult Wisehands as opposed to the Dreamy Whiny Left, but your idol Barack Obama promised the country, in the middle of the Great Recession, that he will freeze government spendings for three years, you silly people.

Only the left called it utter lunacy while Krugman was going ah-uh-ah.

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One certain thing is that Biden's foreign policy will be disastrous.

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Yeah, this really happened all right, lol.

What a cunt.

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Oh, man.

Gabriel Attal, the government spokesperson, said the French president had “real symptoms”. He had “a cough, a fever and is very fatigued”, Attal said.

This probably means "very sick." The worst Covid-19 symptom trio (not in terms of fatality, but in terms of OMG-I-feel-so-fucking-sick-that-you-wouldn't-believe-it) are a cough, fever and extreme fatigue. They make a grown man cry. Every time you cough you feel serious pain, and the high fever cycle comes in waves, and makes you shiver like crazy. And the nastiest of all is that extreme fatigue. They all say it's hard to explain.

I just saw a Japanese opposition politician, who got Covid a few months ago, cry on TV as he *simply remembered* how fucking awful it was for him.

I was fatigued too, but wouldn't say *very* fatigued, just regular flu-like fatigue with muscle aches. They say that it's way worse than that.

Macron must be having a pretty rough time right now.

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If you still think your high-grade children should go to Stanford, what the hell is wrong with you. It's a shit school that serves odious people. Always was, but Covid made it abundantly clear.

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Maybe I shouldn't hesitate to call myself American since "the thing" is indeed what I saw at first too, like that's all I could see.

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Er, what? What did you call it just now?



LOL

"Heritage"

"Culture"

Very strong fascist-Robert-Heinlein energy too.

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I'm a coward who doesn't like predicting stuff, but I'm 100% certain that in 5-10 years we will have another virus that mess with a huge number of people. The recent zoonosis rates look pretty bad. MANY viruses are itching to jump from animals to humans. It's not monday-quarterbacking to say there's no wonder we got Covid-19. It was bound to happen sooner or later. It's just that most of us didn't know. Did you even know the word "zoonosis?"

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Moderna vaccine has been approved by the FDA.

Needle time, folks. Your turn may be months away, but be ready for the needle!

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This might scare you, like ZOMG THIS MEANS THE VIRUSES MUTATE LIKE CRAZY AND WE ARE DOOMED! but it's actually good news.

The conclusion of this study, if true, means we can deal with SARS-CoV-2. This particular virus, which has already caused so much havoc around the globe, is rather ordinary.

But the vaccines will have to be updated to keep up with the mutations. And that won't be very hard.

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I'd take that story about the "new strain" in England with a grain of salt at this point. They say that it's "1.5-1.7 times more contagious" and stuff like that, but I haven't seen or heard any proof yet. That's a very specific, definitive claim, you know.

There have been COUNTLESS variants of SARS-CoV-2 already. We need proof that this one is somehow special, different from all the others, enough to deserve much attention.

And I don't know how they calculate the transmissibility to reach that conclusion. There are so many different factors that contribute to the infection rates that it should be extremely hard to pin it on a "new strain" like that.

There have been a few such claims in Japan this year too ("This one is more contagious and that's why it's spiking in Tokyo!"), and all of those claims have just faded away. And there are good reasons for that.

We should take a look at the proof first.

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I always talked about how Donald Trump only truly cared about foreign policy, but there's someone else who is kind of like that. His name is Joe Biden.

He LOVES foreign policy. That's what he became a Senator for in fact - traveling around, meeting foreign people, world leaders.

And that's not good. The politicians who love foreign policy tend to have very misguided views on the world precisely because they love it too much, and Biden isn't an exception.

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Britain has surprised me more than a few times in the last decade. My crappy crystal ball has served me well with the global Covid-19 situation, the US election, vaccine development, etc, but it's extra foggy when it comes to that country.

But seriously, is it possible that Boris Johnson is going to survive for much longer? I did say I couldn't see him survive into the next year, and I will definitely be proven wrong on that it seems.

But surely, there's a ticking time bomb installed somewhere, right?

The whole concept of having a unilateral truce with the viruses for a few days boggled the mind. And now it seems that the viruses refused to accept it, complaining that they weren't consulted.

Quelle surprise.

I'm of the opinion that it's a bit unfair to blame the Covid-19 situation mostly on the governments, as many of the factors are practically uncontrollable, but there are a few exceptions. Some policies are just so obviously moronic, and so is whoever came up with them.

And even more importantly, it seems that Brexit is going to total shit either way. You can't blame it on a "new strain."

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OK, I've just seen parts of the presentation on the "new strain," and it does seem that it's a variant (not "strain") that is beating its competitions (= other variants). But "0.4 increase in R" sounds shaky. You can't say that without taking into account other factors. I wouldn't trust such a number.

But you can definitely say that this one is winning among the various variants, and there are reasons for that.

Should we be alarmed? Yes, unfortunately. Any variant beating its multiple competitions is alarming, and one important point of keeping the infection rates low is to prevent the virus from mutating *too much*. You let the viruses spread freely, and the chances of a stronger variant emerging will steadily increase. That's what happened in England, as this variant does seem to have originated there. But needless to say, it could happen anywhere.

Should we be VERY alarmed? I'd say probably NO.