gearhog

Looking back on history, when a nation experiences tough economic times, shortages, and a declining standard of living, what types of problems do governments tend to experience from it's population? When people come to believe that the government is the cause of their troubled lives, do they lose faith thereby exacerbating the problems? What happens when people lose faith in the government and it's economy/currency? If you were a high-ranking member of government or someone who has a large financial stake in it's success, what steps would you take to ensure the people remain obedient? Would you increase the cost of disobedience? How? How would you convince them it's for their own good? https://www.politico.com/f/?id=0000017b-c604-d5dd-a3ff-ef0464aa0000

Jen Psaki announced yesterday that Joe Biden will announce 6 steps today to combat COVID. Count the number times of she uses the word "mandate" when referring to previous actions. Let's watch the remarks today and note how much more our liberties will be permanently eroded. Video begins at the pertinent timestamp:

I honestly didn't realize we agree on this. Mandates are not the way. That's really the crux, isn't it? If you're not going to force me to make the same life decisions as you, we can disagree indefinitely and nothing of consequence happens as we each assume responsibility for our own personal risk assessment. I will concede that things may be far, far worse than I imagined. Someone waited "thousands of minutes" for a rural ER. I'm not laughing at the people waiting, I'm laughing at the media desperation.

I would love to come over for dinner, but you strike me as a vegan. (I, kid) Honest question: Why would her coworkers, who have the same job, and see the same things she does, refuse to get vaccinated?

You just now used statements from articles you earlier quoted to fabricate an entire future conversation with your wife to convince me that you've got a handle on reality. It's a bit of a stretch, bro. Don't blame your wife for things you clearly read online.

I should have said it differently. Don't sit and watch cable news and think you're informed. Televised news is designed to appeal to your emotions more so than written articles. I posted a Youtube clip that was embedded in an article of the CDC Director just so you can see and hear the same people that got you worked up over this are now walking back and changing the narrative. It won't be long until all your other narratives get the same treatment. In one sentence, you're "worry free". Immediately following that declaration, there's all this hand-wringing, stress, and frustration over the unvaccinated. You say you're not worried, yet every single thing you post outside of that statement indicates otherwise. "The healthcare shortage is going to make the pilot shortage look like child's play!" "You're gonna wait hours and hours for the ER!" "We're rationing healthcare! The AP says so!" Relax, man. You are going to be fine. Your wife is going to be fine. Did you not read the articles I posted links to from years prior? It's the same exact shit. Rationed healthcare, overflowing ERs, stressed healthcare workers... etc, etc, etc. All of it occurred prior to 2020, and will occur years from now. You can't run a healthcare system or any other industry with huge amounts of excess capacity (military industrial businesses excepted). There are ebbs and flows in demand across every industry.

Like a baby. You should try it. 1. Exercise 2. Only read the news. Never watch it. 3. No screens after 10pm. 4. Stop being afraid. You're going to die anyway.

Don't be gullible. It's the same recycled headline and hysteria. The AP is getting lazy. 2018: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-5279685/California-hospitals-looks-like-flu-war-zone.html 2019: https://www.dispatchhealth.com/blog/ers-are-overwhelmed-with-flu-patients-mobile-urgent-care-is-the-solution/ January 2020: https://www.foxla.com/news/flu-tent-set-up-at-loma-linda-as-cases-on-rise-oc-suffers-first-flu-death-of-season Also, you can cross off "Vaccines stop the spread" as one of the arguments virtual-signalling pro-vaxxer's can use.

LOL. 3 minutes, 29 seconds. How are you not embarrassed by mindlessly parroting these "scientific truths" that are constantly changing? Try to keep up.

Which of our pro-vax friends here disagrees with the ACLU? American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Pandemic Preparedness The Need For a Public Health -Not A Law Enforcement/National Security-Approach https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/privacy/pemic_report.pdf Government agencies have an essential role to play in helping to prevent and mitigate epidemics. Unfortunately, in recent years, our government’s approach to preparing the nation for a possible influenza pandemic has been highly misguided. Too often, policymakers are resorting to law enforcement and national security-oriented measures that not only suppress individual rights unnecessarily, but have proven to be ineffective in stopping the spread of disease and saving lives. The following report examines the relationship between civil liberties and public health in contemporary U.S. pandemic planning and makes a series of recommendations for developing a more effective, civil liberties-friendly approach. Conflating Public Health with National Security and Law Enforcement Rather than focusing on well-established measures for protecting the lives and health of Americans, policymakers have recently embraced an approach that views public health policy through the prism of national security and law enforcement. This model assumes that we must “trade liberty for security.” As a result, instead of helping individuals and communities through education and provision of health care, today’s pandemic prevention focuses on taking aggressive, coercive actions against those who are sick. People, rather than the disease, become the enemy. Lessons from History American history contains vivid reminders that grafting the values of law enforcement and national security onto public health is both ineffective and dangerous. Too often, fears aroused by disease and epidemics have justified abuses of state power. Highly discriminatory and forcible vaccination and quarantine measures adopted in response to outbreaks of the plague and smallpox over the past century have consistently accelerated rather than slowed the spread of disease, while fomenting public distrust and, in some cases, riots. The lessons from history should be kept in mind whenever we are told by government officials that “tough,” liberty-limiting actions are needed to protect us from dangerous diseases. Specifically: • Coercion and brute force are rarely necessary. In fact they are generally counterproductive—they gratuitously breed public distrust and encourage the people who are most in need of care to evade public health authorities. • On the other hand, effective, preventive strategies that rely on voluntary participation do work. Simply put, people do not want to contract smallpox, influenza or other dangerous diseases. They want positive government help in avoiding and treating disease. As long as public officials are working to help people rather than to punish them, people are likely to engage willingly in any and all efforts to keep their families and communities healthy. • Minorities and other socially disadvantaged populations tend to bear the brunt of tough public health measures. ...History warns that vulnerable populations may well be subjected to unnecessary and arbitrary detentions if a pandemic strikes.The same point is applicable to vaccinations. The problem will not be that force is needed to vaccinate the population, rather that vaccine will be unavailable or in limited supply and will have to be rationed while people line up to demand access. Nonetheless it is worth emphasizing to public officials that the Supreme Court has ruled that competent individuals have a right to refuse any medical treatment, including life-sustaining treatment, and this includes vaccinations.. And it goes on, and on, and on... Read it

The Intercept just published 900 pages of FOIA released documents regarding the origins of COVID and it's research funding. I've only spent about 20 minutes reading through and I've already read some unbelievable shit. Do yourself a favor and read some of it. It's insane. You won't be seeing it on the nightly news. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21055989-understanding-risk-bat-coronavirus-emergence-grant-notice https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21055988-risk-zoonotic-virus-hotspots-grant-notice page 114 of the first link: Aim 3: Testing predictions of CoV inter-species transmission. We will test our models of host range (i.e. emergence potential) experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments in cell culture and humanized mice. With bat-CoVs that we've isolated or sequenced, and using live virus or pseudovirus infection in cells of different origin or expressing different receptor molecules, we will assess potential for each isolated virus and those with receptor binding site sequence, to spill over. We will do this by sequencing the spike (or other receptor binding/fusion) protein genes from all our bat-CoVs, creating mutants to identify how significantly each would need to evolve to use ACE2, CD26/DPP4 (MERS-CoV receptor) or other potential CoV receptors. We will then use receptor-mutant pseudovirus binding assays, in vitro studies in bat, primate, human and other species' cell lines, and with humanized mice where particularly interesting viruses are identified phylogenetically, or isolated. These tests will provide public health-relevant data, and also iteratively improve our predictive model to better target bat species and Co Vs during our field studies to obtain bat-CoV strains of the greatest interest for understanding the mechanisms of cross-species transmission.

@frog, I understand your point, but I haven't done a good job in making mine. I hesitate to try, because any attempt to adequately explain why I hold my beliefs will turn into multiple 10,000 words essays. I'll try to keep it brief, but it's going to take multiple posts. At the risk of oversimplification, let's say that in each of your examples, a authoritarian and tyrannical leader essentially took over a country, assumed vast amounts of power, and the results were mostly terrible. We have the luxury of looking back, studying the events, and come away with a basic understanding of what happened. Bear in mind we've only just begun to experience a giant upheaval we can't yet understand. Things are much much different now. There is so much more at stake. Bear with me. First take a look at this. Check out the concentrations of wealth, the unimaginable numbers, try to understand what derivatives are. And where do you think this leads? We're living in a finite system of resources where nearly everything is going parabolic, including complexity. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-money-and-markets-in-one-visualization-2020/ Monopoly, Price's Law, and the Pareto Distribution. I'll argue they not only explain the distribution of wealth, but authority, power, and control as well.

"The collapse of the Afghan Army/Gov't happened at a much faster rate than anyone expected. It was a surprise." https://twitter.com/MrsT106/status/1434473115636150273?s=20 Really? https://www.reuters.com/world/exclusive-call-before-afghan-collapse-biden-pressed-ghani-change-perception-2021-08-31/

Keep pulling that thread, brother. See where it takes you.

We're witnessing the biggest seizure of power in history. It sounds like hyperbole until you realize it's not. Pay attention. Newly empowered Center for Disease Control is bringing gun violence under its authority. https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/27/health/cdc-gun-research-walensky/index.html

Brother, that's fair. I obviously don't agree and wish your line was closer to mine. That's not going to happen but I don't think it needs to today. I'm glad that you have a line in the sand, but yours is going to be surpassed as well as long as you don't move it. When it happens, you're also going to have to make a decision about whether to speak out against it. Tyranny and authoritarianism is by far the default and most common form of governance. It doesn't stop until a level of resistance is met that (hopefully) places you and I on the same side. I, of couse, want you to think the same as me. "This is too far". I'm confident I won't have to wait long for that to happen.

I'm all out of upvotes today, fellas, but... Yes.

Absolutely no one here has said any of the things you're falsely attributing to my position or anyone else's who thinks our response to COVID is going way too far. We can't have a civil discussion on the singular issue at hand without one side of the argument chiming in with "Whataboutisms", hyperbole, and hysterics (Fuck, motherfuckers, goddamnit, etc.) Can you not defend your position on COVID without relying on unrelated and irrelevant arguments? We've just established 83.3% of our population has COVID antibodies as of 4 months ago (while the herd immunity threshold is widely regarded at an "unachievable" 60-70%), pharmaceutical companies are applying pressure for endless boosters and now pills, and COVID passports are already in the United States. The only difference between us is where we drawn the line of "common sense". It is vastly apparent to me that we've crossed the definition of it, but you're unwilling to specify where you draw the line. I believe it is more important to you to defend the side you've chosen than to admit that people will take from you until say "That's enough." Where was your alarmism in 2018? source: https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patients/

Just a friendly reminder that this issue is larger than the military.

Pfizer CEO doubling down: Vaccinations and Boosters aren't good enough. Non-hospitalized low risk adults also need Pfizer's new and improved oral medication. What more does it take for people to understand what is obviously happening? Snap out of it, FFS. The Press Release: https://t.co/su5VtfbWPX?amp=1 The CEO:

US CDC Study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association last night: 83.3% of the US population had protection from SARS-CoV-2 by way of injection and natural exposure antibodies. IN MAY 2021. Unbelievable. Our response is more about leverage than threat. Link to the study: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2784013 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-9952555/CDC-study-estimates-80-Americans-protected-COVID-19.html

That's insane. It's the one place I've always wanted to go, but have never been. I guess I won't be. Perhaps these programs will be rolled back as soon as the Delta variant is gone. Do you suppose? Why do most provisions of the Patriot Act continue to get reauthorization? Why would a previously perfectly rational western democratic government make these draconian changes seemingly against the will of their population? It just doesn't make sense. Perhaps we're looking at it wrong. Extreme responses to COVID variants drive the need for social credit technology. Social credit technology drives the need for extreme responses to COVID variants. What would cause otherwise successful and elite Western democratic leaders and corporations to want to unilaterally impose these kinds of social changes? They sincerely believe that these compromises on Freedom must be made in the interest of self-preservation. The deadlocks and widening divisions between Western political parties are not allowing governments to respond quickly enough to what they believe are imminent threats, including economies, financial systems, climate change, and population growth. Trudeau explains:

This is not a theory. Read this carefully. This is at our doorstep. Not from a fringe website. From The Atlantic. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/619940/

From this morning’s email from the US Department of Veterans Affairs. LOL, so ridiculous considering the leading comorbidities form “Covid deaths” are heart disease, obesity, and diabetes.

I’ve never heard of this guy before, but those are some harsh words considering the number of private rescue missions currently being conducted. Just this morning, I responded to a request seeking current and qualified 737 pilot for some sort of rescue op. If called, I’ll be out the door before the call ends. Personally, I kind of admire someone willing to take a risk to rescue fellow Americans who were abandoned, even if unsuccessful. I doubt counting on anyone else to come to his rescue was part of the calculus. Just a different opinion, man. EDIT:?Dunbar nailed it. What he said.