Random Rant Thread

[miscmisc]

I said she was a joke, and she is. In most likelihood always will be. She's a typical shallow careerist, and has already absolutely overachieved. I have no idea how the hell so many people missed that.

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Another article on Kamala Harris, but JFC, the mainstream media, particularly blowhards like Politico, do like piling on once the "mood" has shifted, don't they. Fucking ghouls.

"Bluetooth phobia"

WTF?

Bluetooth IS a well-known security risk, so there's absolutely nothing wrong with what Harris is doing there. She's the fucking VP of the USA. So she is unfit for the office because she's too careful, and Hillary was unfit for the office because she was too careless? Which is it, Politico? I vividly remember you absolutely piling on Hillary Clinton for her email thing as well. 

Good grief, man. These people.

All these fucking morons know is how to pile on, like the worst kind of bullies. These same people were gushing over her not so long ago.

[miscmisc]

Austria has been hit badly by the Delta wave lately, and this is the chart of ICU patients in Vienna, by age and vaccination status.




I mean, for the n-th time, of course.

[gols]

Dec 4, 2021 4:27:31 GMT 1 miscmisc said:

I guess I keep getting Boris Johnson wrong because I keep underestimating the stupidity of Labour. I thought the biggest factor in the remarkable survival of Boris Johnson was that he's the Brexit personified that cannot be easily removed from the British polity, like a tumor, and that the second biggest one was that he's adored by a significant faction of the British mainstream media as if he was one of their own.

But there's always Labour and their incompetence. Somehow I kept missing that elephant in the room.

Oh, and The Walking Dead is a fine TV show that should be more than a guilty pleasure, and the fact that I stopped watching it around Season 5 says more about my priority than about the quality. Despite what I've said about it recently, it's clearly one of the best shows ever.

Which I can definitely not say about the spinoff show (World Beyond) that I was forced to watch a few weeks ago, lol.

I think the things you listed are still much bigger factors than Labour's stupidity. It should probably be clarified that it is the right wing of Labour's stupidiity as they are the ones in charge now and they are the ones who spent the last 5 years trying to make sure that their own party did not win an election.

I think Walking Dead did go downhill after season 5 - I got quite tired of it during the very long Negan storyline. But it picked up again in the later seasons.

[miscmisc]

Yeah, and what's also striking is how stellar a bunch of demagogues and mediocrities the rest of the Tories are. Few of them seem to have any love for Johnson - in fact most of them seem to outright despise him privately or even semi-openly - and almost none of them seem like a clear improvement over him. That's a tad scary.

I wonder what Johnson would be doing now if it wasn't for the pandemic. There seems to be another round of "scandals" going on, and common sense should tell you and me that there will be some serious leadership challenge to come soon, but what do I know. UK politics seems to be one thing that I never get.

And yeah, I knew about Negan, and he sounded like a more powerful and considerably less interesting version of the Governor.

[miscmisc]

I've been in Japan for months now (and can't leave for the US due to all kinds of inconveniences and restrictions partially due to Omicron, and to be honest don't really want to anyway), and yes, I'm still spooked by the mind-bogglingly low infection rates, let alone hospitalizations and deaths, that has been going on for two months now. You could arguably call it a Covid-free situation, really. Japan is a big country, so 100 PCR positive test results a day is truly a drop in the bucket.

It seems like Delta decided to commit mass suicide here. That's how quickly they were gone and haven't come back since.

Every country has a cycle of its own, and most European countries for instance had a merry low-Covid summer in 2021 unlike Japan. The vaccination in Japan was delayed by two months or so compared to much of Europe. But none of those European countries had such absurdly low infection rates for so long, not even close, ever.

I know this is a wrong way to put it, but I'm kind of waiting for the next wave, how it will materialize here in Japan. It is most likely to be Omicron, but who knows.

No matter what, it's definitely super intriguing, what happened in this country in early October. I've been bombarded by Americans with the question of what/how/why, but the hell I know.

[miscmisc]

Oh, and if you've ever heard this "Ivermectin saved Japan" story somewhere, well, you know the drill, right? It's just that some kooks willfully misunderstood one Japanese doctor promoting it at a press conference some time. He's a chief of Tokyo Ishikai = nobody, and the drug hasn't been widely used at all. What's truly spooky is the low infection rates anyway. The Japanese Covid death rates are very low to begin with.

[miscmisc]

I've been saying masks work since March 2020 in this thread, so no need to revisit that. But you know what's equally or even more important?

Not talking. Keeping your goddamn mouth shut around people.

You wear a mask loosely or incorrectly and then talk loud. That's not really "wearing a mask in public space."

[miscmisc]

No surprise empirically, but some actual scientific data to back it up:

The Coronavirus Attacks Fat Tissue, Scientists Find
The research may help explain why people who are overweight and obese have been at higher risk of severe illness and death from Covid.
www.nytimes.com/2021/12/08/health/covid-fat-obesity.html?smid=tw-share

[miscmisc]

The speed at which Omicron has been spreading in the UK is breathtaking. It's not the kind of a pace that we've ever seen in this pandemic. Even Delta pales in comparison.



Such a beautiful steep straight line going upwards!

We gotta pray for the suspected/alleged/roughly-estimated lower severity, because otherwise it would be very bad. It seems that a huge infection wave is all but inevitable in most places, and we don't have much time for preparation.

[miscmisc]

Oh, man.

Pre-existing humoral immunity to human common cold coronaviruses negatively impacts the protective SARS-CoV-2 antibody response
www.cell.com/cell-host-microbe/fulltext/S1931-3128(21)00570-9

The gist of it is that the more perfectly prepared your immune system is for the coronaviruses that cause common cold, the more vulnerable you are to SARS-CoV-2, because your immune system mistakes the latter for the former and sends out wrong soldiers with wrong weapons, thus massively wasting energy and time.

Fuck.

[miscmisc]

It's going straight up all the way. Extraordinary.

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The first person who blocked me on Twitter, among the ones I was aware of, was Anne Applebaum. It was a looooong time ago, and she did over absolutely nothing. Incredibly thin-skinned.

I was blocked by Donald Trump too a very long time ago, but that was mostly because of me being a total ass (to a gigantic ass, to be fair to myself).

What I mean is that I'm polite online - outside this thread, that is - enough to be able to remember who blocked me as long as I could recognize them.

[miscmisc]

Health care workers have been and are being pushed to the absolutely limit in the Delta waves. My biggest fear re: Omicron is that the health care system in your area will all but collapse mainly because nurses in particular will have quit en masse.

[miscmisc]

I've been rude to doctors and nurses in this thread, but that's typically what someone who grew up in a medical household does. We know the kooks, and also perfectly understand how tough Covid-19 has been for the good ones. We really, really understand the physical, mental toll of it.