Sorry, I wasn’t clear – I was referring to the currently RWNJ-leaning SCOTUS here being willing to condemn its “supporters” to getting sicker than the rest of us because of their cockeyed ideas.
I too have extreme problems with the virus floating around and am furious that we are the point that public health has become a political football. In a normal world, we would all be pulling together to protect each other from such easily conquerable threats. But at the moment, we do not live in a “normal” world thanks to FatAss and his crazies, so there is a part of me which says, okay, if that’s the way they want it, let’s hope the Darwinian solution gets rid of enough of them to let the rest of us achieve herd immunity.
“If there is some disease out there, maybe there’s just an ebb and flow to life where something’s supposed to wipe out a certain amount of people, and that’s just kind of the way evolution goes.”
Yeah, totally! Why fight cancer, or even use antibiotics??? The super smart guy at the russian-news station says that they had it all figured out since the beginning of time and medical research is a waste of time, money and effort. Stupid doctors.
BTW, Fauci’s boss, the director of the NIH (Francis Collins) is also an evangelical guy. He accepts the overwhelming evidence about the natural world, which is, as you know, the role of science. Spiritual beliefs are a different way of knowing about the human experience.
Although I’m retired, I’m feeling a vibe to engage my undergraduate students in discussions😉.
Yes! All too often we forget why the GOP is clinging desperately to Trump, passing voter suppression efforts that seek to throw out the results of elections they don’t like, trying to further separate their base from reality, and supporting attempts to overthrow duly elected governments. It’s because they’re dying and they know it. The best bet they’ve got is to quadruple down on Trump again in hopes that those 11 million additional voters from 2020 will come out while Joe Biden’s 14 million won’t and that Manchin and Sinema will stick to their idiotic guns.
Yes, it’s just horrid. Here in Germany we also have our nutcases – our next-door neighbors won’t get vaccinated and we have others in our group of friends and acquaintances who refuse as well.
So…we only socialize with those who have their shots. There has been enough coming out about breakthrough infections with a later, mutated form that we flat out ask “had your shots?”. And we carry our vaccination passports with us all the time.
The Court refused to take up the inane stolen election cases, but poor, poor, cynical me thinks that was because they knew how many state election results they would have to strike down to achieve the goal. Pragmatism triumphed over ideology this time, but they have authorized the red states to change the rules so the Court will not have to intervene. That will let them hide behind separation of powers, saying it is up to Congress, not the Courts, to solve any perceived problems.
As I still cry into to wilderness Trump and Co didn’t talk about COVID overseas, unless it was to bash China. And since Fox and Trump didn’t talk about the effect of COVID on the rest of the world his followers don’t think about it.
I say the only way to make them sit up and take notice is to give a cut off date on the vaccine being free. And for some who may need to get a booster that would still be free because they already participated in the plan to help themselves and others stay safe.
I can guarantee that some will take heed and get themselves vaccinated, but some won’t. And that will be their own damn fault.
In explaining the ultimate truth, both science and religion ultimately fall short. But science holds its truths as provisional, a mere work in progress, and always subject to change upon additional information.
And that’s because science is not actually about “knowing” anything for certain, but about gathering, evaluating and verifying evidence.
When a scientific hypothesis is put forward, it is rigorously tested by many independent researchers, and if the original findings, on rigorous testing, can be consistently replicated, then the hypothesis becomes accepted as the best explanation to date and will stand until someone puts forward a new hypothesis which either disproves the current one or advances it from its present position.
What we have, then, is a weight of evidence provisionally agreed upon by the scientific community which represents our current state of knowledge, but which is also subject to constant questioning of accepted truths. Scientific certainty betrays the spirit of independent inquiry and the belief that all knowledge is subject to rigorous scrutiny.
Summer travel, even within the EU, is already difficult this summer. Hopefully, the EU will get the vaccination passport operational soon. In Finland, the vaccination rate for the total population now exceeds 62%, but fully vaccinated are not yet at 25%. De facto, most of the country cannot yet travel. A lot of this has to do with the slow rollout of vaccines in the EU, but currently the problem is more the long spacing (12 weeks) between first and second dose. Obviously, in three months the situation will be much improved, especially for the 20-30 year-olds, who are taking the brunt of infections at the moment.
Please! Introduce me! I’ve not met an engineer yet that did not blindly follow the book on how to practice their profession. Not one of them has imagined themselves in the role of a living human being, but only as the executor of their professional religion. No exceptions. Period.
yes - not sure if this is the fault line upon which the great schism will form - but maybe … or maybe another like it - what seems almost certain is that they will be a fracture of epic proportions - there is too much intensity, too much dogmatic insistence on exclusive title to being the “ONLY answer” for them to survive.
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Justin Riemer - Chief Counsel to the Republican National Committee - guy seems to have an awful lot of the entrenched bureaucracy of the Republican Party backing him up - What die-hard MAGAs have to get through their granite skulls is that the rank&file - the operating structure of the Republican party - is willing to wear the Trump bell-bottom jeans and nehru jackets - for as long as they are trendy - the minute the spell is broken - that crap is going in the trash & all the pictures get burned … and some Republican organization people think (like Riemer -complaining about the mess Trumpers are making) that is is coming soon & they have ordered the dumpsters to be ready for the mass disposal…
The Republican Party’s top lawyer warned in November against continuing to push false claims that the presidential election was stolen, calling efforts by some of the former president’s lawyers a “joke” that could mislead millions of people, according to an email obtained by The Washington Post.
Justin Riemer, the Republican National Committee’s chief counsel, sought to discourage a Republican Party staffer from posting claims about ballot fraud on RNC accounts, the email shows, as attempts by Donald Trump and his associates to challenge results in a number of states, such as Arizona and Pennsylvania, intensified.
“What Rudy and Jenna are doing is a joke and they are getting laughed out of court,” Riemer, a longtime Republican lawyer, wrote to Liz Harrington, a former party spokeswoman, on Nov. 28, referring to Trump attorneys Rudolph W. Giuliani and Jenna Ellis. “They are misleading millions of people who have wishful thinking that the president is going to somehow win this thing.”
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