Friday's Forum
James Joyner · Friday, September 10, 2021 · 33 comments
FILED UNDER: Open Forum
Friday, 10 September 2021 at 06:50
@clydehaberman
Smallpox was not yet eradicated when I was a boy. Polio was dreaded. Measles, chicken pox, mumps & other diseases were part of life.
And they would be with us in the U.S. now if the resistance to vaccines by today's lunkheads had been prevalent back then.
Speaking of lunkheads:
@ToddStarnes
Biden says even @FoxNews has a mandatory vaccine policy. Is that true? That can't be true. Have Hannity and Tucker and the others gotten the vaccine? That just can't be true.
https://twitter.com/toddstarnes/status/1436075172797288456?s=21
@Teve: The replies to that are glorious.
I can't believe he didn't know that already.
@Teve: He needs to call HR
https://twitter.com/ryangrim/status/1417170448375287816/photo/1
Kylopod says:
@Jen: I must confess that when I read that tweet here, I didn't immediately remember who Todd Starnes is, and I assumed it was a liberal engaging in snark. It's so hard to tell these days….
Fun fact: The term "Poe's Law" (the difficulty in telling satire of extremists apart from the real thing) was originally coined to describe creationists.
@Teve: BTW, I suspect this only applies to actual employees of Fox Corp, not the contracted talent like Hannity, Carlson, or Starnes.
@Scott: Hannity and Carlson have pleaded the 5th, which is the same as a confession.
Now this first sentence in Politico Playbook just made me laugh out loud:
The only group of people that has disappointed JOE BIDEN more than the Afghan national army is unvaccinated Americans.
@Scott: I'm not so sure. Talent is an investment, and they likely want to protect that investment. There's probably some provision somewhere that they take reasonable measures to protect their health and safety.
Mikey says:
This is incredible. Anyone local to Denver, maybe you know someone who knows someone…spread the word.
Mercedes Martinez
@MercedesLV
Did my dad help you on September 11, 2001? If so, I'm trying to find you. (a thread)
On September 11th, 2001 my dad caught a flight in Ohio to fly home to Denver. He was there on business and was anxious to get home to see his family. (1/11)
Shortly after takeoff, the pilot announced that the flight was being grounded. There was a breach of security and they had to land at the nearest airport. That airport was in Omaha. The pilot said he was hoping to have more information for the passengers when they landed. (2/11)
My dad knew something was wrong, so as soon as he got cell service, he called one of the rental car companies and asked to rent the biggest van they had. At this point they were still in the air. (3/11)
When he deplaned and heard what was happening, he made his way to either Avis or Hertz (we aren't sure which one he called), got the van, parked, and went back to the terminal. He found a cardboard box by a trashcan and asked to borrow a sharpie from a ticket agent. (4/11)
He made a sign out of the box that said "GOING TO DENVER" on it. People started approaching him asking if he was going that way. He said yes, he rented a van and he would be able to take 7 people with him. Word started to get around. (5/11)
He found 7 strangers, all scared (so was he), that just wanted to get home to their families.The 8 of them hopped in and my dad drove them from Omaha to Denver. When they got to the metro area, he drove every single person to their home. (6/11)
If you know the Denver area, it's big. There are many suburbs in the area. But each one got front door service. They all offered to pay him for the cost of the van. He wouldn't accept it. They offered him gas money. He didn't take it. (7/11)
To him, seeing those people make it to their families when the country was being attacked was the only thing that mattered to him. Many of those people kept in touch with him for several years after 9/11/01. It warmed his heart. We were so proud of him. We still are. (8/11)
My dad died from brain cancer on July 24, 2016. I often wonder if those people still remember him. I wonder if on the 20th anniversary of that day, will they think of him for a split second when they reflect on where they were? (9/11)
I know social media is powerful and I'm really hoping this tweet finds those people. I'd love to hear about that drive. His name is Emilio. And I know there were so many heroes that day. I am grateful for each and every one. My dad has and always will be my hero. (10/11)
And I do believe my dad was a hero to 7 people that needed to get to their families in Denver on September 11th, 2001. If you were one of them, please DM me. (11/11)
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1436162538622779394.html
@Mikey: ❤️
Mister Bluster says:
@Jax:..In an ideal world, we'd be taxing the churches, too.
In an ideal world we would require that evolution and natural selection be taught in Sunday school side by side with Genesis. You know, level playing field, equal time and all that.
charon says:
https://twitter.com/DanaHoule/status/1436186549830537220
Biden keeps an eye on the polls. But what the Political Press can't fathom is that he doesn't let the frothng and the hysteria of the *minority* determine his goals, or his course of action.
One advantage to being 78 years old, btw.
Repugs, of course, are always like that…
9:17 PM · Sep 9, 2021·Tweetbot for iΟS
Yes, it's both. And like Pelosi—& person of steadfast principles, as well as an avid reader of baseball boxscores, which are numbers w no spin—his convictions, plus his trust in data, plus his trust in his staff/advisors overpower any fears RE the press or short term unpopularity
https://twitter.com/stuartpstevens/status/1436167717275459585
To be clear, most Republicans are worried the Biden plan will work. Covid is the key to the economy and if Covid drops, economy goes up and Republicans want the economy to fail under Biden. It's not that Republicans think the plan won't work, they are terrified it will.
@Mister Bluster:
Hard Disagree. Churches can promote any fanciful stories they want. It's not the government's business regulating their speech. It's just not fit for science class in public schools. See also Mclean v Arkansas, Edwards v Aguillard, and Kitzmiller v Dover.
@Teve:..Hard Disagree
I am always confused when people take me seriously.
In my ideal world there would be
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
@Mister Bluster: like somebody pointed out on some other thread, when creationism is concerned, it's impossible to distinguish between the sincere and the spoof.
Moderna's working on a combined COVID booster and flu shot. I hope we don't have to wait for the whole shebang to just get the booster!!
https://www.ksl.com/article/50237896/moderna-working-on-combination-covid-19-vaccine-booster-and-flu-shot
@Teve: oh mibad it was this thread.
@Jax: I just looked at my 5g Bill Gates Soros vaxx card, and I got Moderna #1 on 3/25. I'll take boosters ASAP.
@Kylopod:
The creationists have fallen on hard times. After losing some bigly court cases in the 80's, a lawyer named Philip Johnson came up with the incredibly stupid strategy of rebranding as "Intelligent Design". They changed "god" to "the designer" and "creationists" to "Intelligent Design Theorists" etc. They literally Global search-and-replaced these terms, and in one draft of a creationist textbook there was a software glitch that resulted in the term "cdesign proponentsists". It made it to trial in 2005 in Pennsylvania, and the creat- excuse me Intelligent Design Theorists crowed because the judge who drew the case, John E. Jones III, was a Republican. I have biologist friends who worked on the case. There was lots of testimony, Michael Behe was properly humiliated, William Dembski was smart enough to decline to testify, and then Jones issued a 139-page decision that is the only 100+ page ruling I've ever read in its entirety. It was basically 139 pages of a federal judge saying "Are you Kidding me??? Are you Fucking kidding me? You assholes seriously thought a court couldn't see through this? Are you Fucking kidding me???" and since then the wind has gone out of the sails.
We actually thought about shutting down the discussion thread where we follow Uncommon Descent, the main ID blog, because once the writing was on the wall anybody with 2 brain cells to rub together abandoned ship, and there are only a few mentally ill people left there now, and it's kinda skeevy to make fun of them.
@Teve:
After losing some bigly court cases in the 80's, a lawyer named Philip Johnson came up with the incredibly stupid strategy of rebranding as "Intelligent Design".
Johnson is generally considered to be the most important founding member of the ID movement, but he didn't coin the phrase–that apparently came from a book called Of Pandas and People, published about a year before Johnson's book Darwin on Trial. Interestingly, Johnson's book didn't even use the phrase except in an offhanded way at a few points in the book (and while describing Of Pandas and People in the appendix); it took a few years before they decided it was the official name of their movement.
There were some other precursors–one of them was Wendell R. Bird's The Origin of Species Revisited. Bird was a creationist attorney who used the phrase "abrupt appearance" as a way of avoiding saying special creation. The common denominator in all these books, though, is that they all appeared less than 5 years after the 1987 SCOTUS decision banning creationism in public schools on the grounds that it violated the Establishment Clause. ID was fundamentally a legal strategy so they could say they weren't engaging in religious advocacy.
OzarkHillbilly says:
This is a story about a curious boy with no name — at least, no name that I ever came to know. It was 2013, more than a decade after the 9/11 attacks. I was a Marine then, back in Afghanistan for a second time.
At the time, I was working to stop a Taliban cell that specialized in making improvised explosive devices. In that effort, a video emerged. I watched it.
I remember him. I cannot forget him. I remember watching a minute-long video showing a static video camera aimed down a narrow path between two mud hut walls, common in the small hamlets often surrounded by opium-poppy fields. On the screen, not much was moving.
I remember the wind from the east kicking up the moon-like dust to the west. The tree and its shadow moved across the ground as the branches and leaves broke up the rays of sunlight to make abstract art patterns on the desert floor.
I remember the boy, full of energy and life, running into the frame and then out of it. From left to right.
With little boys like him — with little boys like mine — the curiosities of life can be palpable. And so the curious boy with no name wandered slowly back into the frame. From right to left.
He is an Afghan and, given the province we're in — Helmand, to be exact — he maybe speaks Pashto. His small size places him somewhere between 3 and 5 years old. Maybe he's 6, a feat in itself; it's said one in 10 children in Afghanistan die before they turn 5.
As his curiosity runs rampant, I know what he does not. When he ran into the frame and then out of it, he had stepped on a soft spot in the ground — a patch different from the rest of the hard-packed dirt. He wanted to know why. I did not.
More at the link. It ends as you expect but it is no less heartbreaking for it.
grumpy realist says:
OK, we've have koalas and owls in the Xmas tree….but zebras in the backyard?
(I especially liked the "I swear I haven't been doing drugs!" comment.)
Neil J Hudelson says:
@grumpy realist:
My father's cousin runs an exotic wildlife rehabilitation center, which happens to be located across the road (and across quite a few acres) of land from my family's farm. Some of the animals can never be fully rehabilitated, which has turned a few acres of his farm into a sanctuary. But, on a long enough timeline, some of those animals get out eventually. In the last few years while visiting the parents, I've had to wait for a herd of camels to clear the road, had to call my cousin for him to come pick up the ostrich waiting patiently by our door for some food, and ask him to bring over "Ms. Kitty," his three-legged mountain lion to help dispose of the deer I hit with my truck.
Last night I'm talking to my mother and she says "I'm sorry, I have to go now. We have zebras in the back yard. Again."
So I guess I'm saying, these things happen.
(Miss Kitty has since passed away–she lived a full life, much longer than she would have in nature given her disabilities. She will be missed, but not forgotten–she's now a nice throw rug draped over a rocking chair.)
Updated stats on the effectiveness of the vaccines.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/09/10/moderna-most-effective-covid-vaccine-studies/
@Teve: Yeah. I'll be eligible by the start of November myself. I do have some qualms about having a booster when most parts of the world haven't had even a chance at a shot yet, though. Either way, I'm a school employee, I'll do what the state suggests.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:..I do have some qualms about having a booster when most parts of the world haven't had even a chance at a shot yet,..
Recently I heard a listener call in program on some NPR venue where a caller expressed similar reservations about booster shots. I have done a brief search on the NPR web site but can't find the cite. Whoever the guest was that was answering callers basically stated that anyone who can get a booster when they are eligible should do it as that will not prevent distribution of vaccines in other parts of the world.
I will do a more thorough search of the NPR site later to see if I can find the reference.
@Mister Bluster: Yeah. I've read the reports myself. A lot of the reason that my getting a booster "will not prevent distribution of vaccines…" is because the logistics for distributing vaccines are challenging to begin with in most places, though. My taking another shot is not going to prevent someone in X from getting vaccinated because all sorts of other factors are already preventing it. Somehow, I don't find that encouraging. 😐
Johnson is generally considered to be the most important founding member of the ID movement, but he didn't coin the phrase–that apparently came from a book called Of Pandas and People, published about a year before Johnson's book Darwin on Trial.
one of the drafts of this book is where 'cdesign proponentsists" appeared.
I just looked up this anecdote, and it concerned the book Of Pandas and People–the one Johnson didn't write (it has several authors) which predates his book by at least a year.
https://ncse.ngo/cdesign-proponentsists
J. D> Vance, whom I'm proud to say I had pegged as q total hypocrite, jackass, and phony even when everyone else was fawning over him and his memoir, is calling for "mass civil disobedience" in response to Biden's vaccine mandate.
Man, where the heck is everybody tonight?! I'm gonna have to go make an OTB bar on decentraland and pretend we're all having beers, apparently.
keef says:
Joe Biden: War Criminal
https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/asia/100000007963596/us-drone-attack-kabul-investigation.html
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