Nov022022

Episode 626 – No Chance!

There are things happening around the world we should know about but we are always stuck within our little bubble.

Joe Biden is on the campaign trail six days before the election. Turns out he should have stayed home.

And a viral article asks for amnesty from all us conspiracy theorists concerning the China virus when it turns out everything we said is true. Let’s go over it.

 

News

Here is some news:

According to the Wall Street Journal:

Saudi Arabia has shared intelligence with the U.S. warning of an imminent attack from Iran on targets in the kingdom, putting the American military and others in the Middle East on an elevated alert level, said Saudi and U.S. officials

In response to the warning, Saudi Arabia, the U.S. and several other neighboring states have raised the level of alert for their military forces, the officials said. They didn’t provide more details on the Saudi intelligence.

  • Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defeated Jair Bolsonaro to become President of Brazil.
    • Lula is a Hugo Chavez socialist.
    • Lula also served time in prison for money laundering and corruption.
    • Bolsonaro is contesting the election because it was really close.
    • There are currently riots in Brazil started from both sides.
    • Brazil is a mess.
  • Benjamin Netanyahu is going to be Prime Minister of Israel again. This time it will be different.
    • He also gained 65 seats in the Knesset, or parliament.
    • There, finally, might not be election in Israel for a while.
  • Elon Musk announced that his monthly fee will be $8 a month.
    • It’s pissed off AOC. She said: “Lmao at a billionaire earnestly trying to sell people on the idea that “free speech” is actually a $8/mo subscription plan.”
    • Well, if it pissed off AOC, I will be buying in. Be prepared for a blue checkmark next to my name!

https://www.npr.org/2022/10/30/1132561987/brazil-election-lula-da-silva
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/02/middleeast/what-netanyahus-return-means-mime-intl/index.html
https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/aoc-hits-elon-musks-possible-twitter-verification-charge
https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-arabia-u-s-on-high-alert-after-warning-of-imminent-iranian-attack-11667319274?mod=hp_lead_pos4

 

This Is Not Going Well

With on week left until the election and the candidates, President and former President are on the road to try to gain back some momentum. Here’s the problem they are having, they have to speak. For most of them, this is easier said than done.

Here is John Fetterman on CNN discussing (sort of) inflation with Don Lemon. How Lemon can keep a straight face, I don’t know.

His brain damage is really showing and I do not believe he is helping himself by doing these interviews and appearances. I know he feels the need to do it because Mehmet Oz has caught up with him. Why Oz isn’t beating this guy like a red-headed step child.

But it isn’t just Fetterman who should keep himself in the basement. Joe Biden is also hitting the campaign trail. He cruising all over the country making speeches which is giving me a lot of sound bites because he can’t say words anymore. He did a speech for Debbie Wasserman Schultz in Florida. People were not excited to hear him as can be heard when he was introduced by Wasserman-Schultz:

Having to get the crowd to cheer for the President of the United States is not a good thing. I can’t think of a worse start. That is until Joe Biden started talking.  He had so many gaffs that Town Hall made a little compilation, so I used that. That’s why you’re going to hear music in the background. It was a good video.

Didn’t take Biden long to show his senility:

This was the start of his speech and he already screwed up. Debbie Wasserman Schultz has never been in the Senate. She’s running for a House seat.

Here he is screwing up the acronym for FEMA:

FEMA stands for Federal Emergence Management Agency. He used just about every word beginning with an “A” except the right one. He should know this since he used it for the hurricane in Florida. What is the name of the hurricane, Joe?

It was Hurricane Ian. Not Ivan, not Ion but Ian.

Biden always needs to bring his dead son in on everything even inflation.

He son served in Iraq but dies of brain cancer in Maryland. He brings up his dead son in almost every speech trying to gin up sympathy. It’s cynical. Notice he never brings up Hunter.

He continues with inflation.

Not partisan enough…Jeez. And, no, we do not have the lowest inflation in the world.

Still more on inflation:

So he’s admitting that there is inflation and we are all affected and…that’s it. At least he didn’t blame anyone for it.

Then he goes off on drug companies but can’t remember what they sell:

He just said, “aspirin” yet he can’t remember what he just said.

How about insulin, Joe?

The guy who invented insulin died in 1935, one year before Biden was born. The guy lies so much and no one fact checks him.

He continues with health care and pulls a Hilary Clinton, switching to a southern accent.

I wonder if he realizes that “boy” is considered a racist term? Probably, but he’s just racist so he doesn’t care.

Finally, to Debbie Wasserman Schultze relief, old decides to close his speech:

You knew that was coming. Damn Republicans need a blessing from God to get smarter. They’re so dumb. Just a reminder that Democrats hold the House, Senate and Presidency.

At least he didn’t blame Trump for the mess he made.

Tonight, Biden has decided to make a speech from the Oval Office. That should be fun.

 

How About No?

Emily Oster is an economist at Brown University. She wrote an article that has gone extremely viral. It’s called Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty: We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.

Let’s go through it.

In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks.  Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”

OK, this family already sounds really annoying!

These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.

No, we actually did know. I am not a doctor and I knew masks didn’t work, being outside was the best way not to catch the virus because of the open air and the sun and

I have been reflecting on this lack of knowledge thanks to a class I’m co-teaching at Brown University on COVID. We’ve spent several lectures reliving the first year of the pandemic, discussing the many important choices we had to make under conditions of tremendous uncertainty.

Some of these choices turned out better than others. To take an example close to my own work, there is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high. The latest figures on learning loss are alarming.  But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information. Reasonable people—people who cared about children and teachers—advocated on both sides of the reopening debate.

All the things she’s talking about were talked about three months after the pandemic started. But everyone who said it was banned from social media or ridiculed.

Another example: When the vaccines came out, we lacked definitive data on the relative efficacies of the Johnson & Johnson shot versus the mRNA options from Pfizer and Moderna. The mRNA vaccines have won out. But at the time, many people in public health were either neutral or expressed a J&J preference. This misstep wasn’t nefarious. It was the result of uncertainty.

“Wasn’t nefarious”? The president of international sales said the vaccines were never tested. They lied about the efficacy of vaccines. They lied about the side effects of the vaccines. They lied about the dangers of COVID. They lied about everything.

Obviously some people intended to mislead and made wildly irresponsible claims. Remember when the public-health community had to spend a lot of time and resources urging Americans not to inject themselves with bleach? That was bad. Misinformation was, and remains, a huge problem. But most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society.

Nobody said we should inject ourselves with bleach. This is just one of the many lies spread because of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Given the amount of uncertainty, almost every position was taken on every topic. And on every topic, someone was eventually proved right, and someone else was proved wrong. In some instances, the right people were right for the wrong reasons. In other instances, they had a prescient understanding of the available information.

The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.

So much here:

  • Getting anything right was not lucky. It was common sense from what we know about viruses.
  • There wasn’t heated and unpleasant conversations here. People’s lives were ruined because they didn’t tow the party line.
  • I was yelled at several times because I wouldn’t wear my mask all the time.
  • I was yelled at in the street because I wasn’t wearing a mask while I was running, alone.

We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge. Los Angeles County closed its beaches in summer 2020. Ex post facto, this makes no more sense than my family’s masked hiking trips. But we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. We need to forgive the attacks, too. Because I thought schools should reopen and argued that kids as a group were not at high risk, I was called a “teacher killer” and a “génocidaire.” It wasn’t pleasant, but feelings were high. And I certainly don’t need to dissect and rehash that time for the rest of my days.

I call BS here. She sounds like the person that would have kept schools closed.

Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve.

Student test scores have shown historic declines, more so in math than in reading, and more so for students who were disadvantaged at the start. We need to collect data, experiment, and invest. Is high-dosage tutoring more or less cost-effective than extended school years? Why have some states recovered faster than others? We should focus on questions like these, because answering them is how we will help our children recover.

Many people have neglected their health care over the past several years. Notably, routine vaccination rates for children (for measles, pertussis, etc.) are way down. Rather than debating the role that messaging about COVID vaccines had in this decline, we need to put all our energy into bringing these rates back up. Pediatricians and public-health officials will need to work together on community outreach, and politicians will need to consider school mandates.

The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well. Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.

So, we should grant amnesty to all those people who lied to us over the past two years. To the same people who are still pushing that we are in a pandemic.

Let’s see:

  • Old people were left to die alone in old folks homes.
  • We hold any funerals.
  • People were fired for not getting vaxxed.
  • Children were kept out of school for two years, erasing two decades of math and reading progress.
  • Children ended up with myocarditis because of the vaccine.
  • 2-year-olds were forced to wear masks.
  • People lost their businesses.
  • Churches were closed.
  • We were being censored on social media.
  • People were arrested for not wearing masks.
  • People couldn’t see their families because restrictions.
  • In China and New Zealand, there were actual concentration camps to imprison COVID positive people.

Let’s remember this small piece of propaganda that was being pushed by people like Jimmie Kimmel:

They wanted us to die. Now they want amnesty?

I also want to point one more thing out. In that article, notice something is missing? They want forgiveness but I still have yet to hear an apology. That seems to be missing from this article.

So, amnesty to the people that have been peddling misinformation about COVID?

F-you! They’ll get some forgiveness when I see people in jail over this.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/covid-response-forgiveness/671879/

 

 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-arabia-u-s-on-high-alert-after-warning-of-imminent-iranian-attack-11667319274?mod=hp_lead_pos4