That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons bring us some web forums whereupon we can gather
http://garbi.online/forum/
You all know my hypothesis. Maybe less extreme on the continuum, they're holding the supplies for politically expedient release or to reward allies.Blackhawk wrote: Sun Apr 19, 2020 10:55 am That's one thing that's really gotten under my skin about all of this. Emergency medical supplies are being bought out from under the states or are intercepted en masse and denied to medical facilities, and nobody seems to know who is getting them, why, or what's happening to them. Meanwhile people are dying because of their lack.
Why this isn't a front page story, why Congress isn't demanding answers and pursuing it as a criminal investigation if they can't get any is confounding. Where are they going? Under whose orders? Is there any pattern to who is getting them and who is not? And for those who are not and have actual, documented deaths as a result, what is the response?
They spent $17M on that shipment and there is a good chance it's unusable.Smoove_B wrote: Sun Apr 19, 2020 10:52 amYeah, it'll be a story some day. However, I think everyone is trying to fly under the radar (literally) and fear if they say anything it will bring more attention to their efforts and likely compromise their ability to get what they need. Better to just ignore Trump and his bully tactics in the public spotlight. Case in point, see Illinois:malchior wrote: Sun Apr 19, 2020 10:36 amI would have loved to hear what the Congressional Rep had to do to prevent the seizure.llinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker organized secret flights bringing millions of masks and gloves to the state from China on charter jets in an effort to bypass potential Trump administration efforts to seize the products, The Chicago Sun-Times reported.
Two invoices from the state revealed $888,275 purchases for "aircraft charter flight to Shanghai, China for COVID-19 response," according to the newspaper.
I get trying to save lives but when the comptroller compares it to a "sketchy drug deal", is she really doing her job? Is anyone?CHICAGO — Millions of masks purchased by the State of Illinois from China may not be useable by those on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic, after multiple states recalled similar equipment Thursday.
...
That includes many KN95 masks bought from China, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said earlier this month was an acceptable alternative to the United States approved N95 masks. State spending records reveal Illinois has already spent nearly $17 million buying the KN95 masks.
But now, officials in Missouri are recalling thousands of KN95 masks after testing by the state’s Department of Health and Senior Services over the weekend found some did not meet their standards, according to director Sandy Kartsen.
...
Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza also acknowledged the wild west nature of purchasing personal protective equipment in an interview last week.
“This is what we’ve resorted to these days: it kind of feels like you’re doing a sketchy drug deal on the side of the road when you’re trying to save people’s lives,” she said.
Smoove_B wrote: Sun Apr 19, 2020 12:24 pm Hopefully they've all signed advanced directives to refuse medical treatment for COVID-19 to trigger the libs.
Toothless. Come into the ER with that tattooed on your forehead and they still can't deny treatment. Best case it makes EOL decision making easier but for anyone not pretty much dead it's fake bravado.
Princess Sofia of Sweden is determined to do her part amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
...
“I am now placed in one of the hospital’s care departments, where together with other newly trained colleagues, I support and relieve the healthcare staff with different tasks,” she wrote on Instagram. “To have the opportunity to help at this difficult time is extremely rewarding.” Her responsibilities include cleaning and assisting in patient care.
The wife of Prince Carl Philip, Sofia is the honorary chairman of the Stockholm hospital. But now, instead of ribbon cutting and plaque unveiling, she’s an employee on the inside. Currently, the country has more than 13,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus.
Reopen Minnesota wrote:t's time to OPEN OUR STATE and STOP Gov Walz' Excessive Quarantine! Politicians are on a power trip, controlling our lives, destroying our businesses, passing laws behind the cover of darkness and forcing us to hand over our freedoms and our livelihood!
ENOUGH! Go to www.ReOpenMN.com and send an email to Tim Walz telling him to stop his excessive quarantine and REOPEN MINNESOTA!
Reopen Pennsylvania wrote:It's time to OPEN UP PENNSYLVANIA and STOP Gov Wolf's Excessive Quarantine!
Politicians are on a power trip, controlling our lives, destroying our businesses, passing laws behind the cover of darkness and forcing us to hand over our freedoms and our livelihood!
ENOUGH! Go to www.ReOpenPA.com and send an email to Tom Wolf telling him to stop his excessive quarantine and REOPEN Pennsylvania
Depends on who you ask. While they have higher rates than other Nordic countries, their economy is less likely to be as deep in the shitter, and their numbers appear manageable (at least for now). They have some structural advantages though, and it looks like the Swedes themselves are taking it very seriously, unlike the Trump Derps in this country that don't seem to understand the scale of things.malchior wrote: Sun Apr 19, 2020 4:57 pmDid Sweden's voluntary social distancing program not work?!?
Yeah I personally don't think 5 times the per capita death rate of your neighbors while 70% are working from home anyway is a measure of success. It's their country so I hope they are ok with it.RunningMn9 wrote: Sun Apr 19, 2020 5:33 pmDepends on who you ask. While they have higher rates than other Nordic countries, their economy is less likely to be as deep in the shitter, and their numbers appear manageable (at least for now). They have some structural advantages though, and it looks like the Swedes themselves are taking it very seriously, unlike the Trump Derps in this country that don't seem to understand the scale of things.malchior wrote: Sun Apr 19, 2020 4:57 pmDid Sweden's voluntary social distancing program not work?!?
Just like the flu, amirite? And that is with a massive lockdown. It is a fine statement about the state of things here to be sure that this is even a controversy at all.For like a week now, COVID-19 has been the number one cause of death in the United States. But people don't seem to have any awareness of that because it's not uniform, and they are comparing annual stats, rather than the dailies. 2000+ people dying each day from a single cause is A LOT. The peak we hit with COVID was a tad over 2500 (that we know about). Which is about 60% higher than the average number of daily deaths from cancer (#2), and about 40% higher than heart disease (#1).
That's the crazy part to me. Let's say we are on the way back down - we probably aren't - but still we lost 40K people in a month. How do people not get what is going on? It's pure head in the sand stuff.While it's certainly true that those causes are sustained rates over the whole year, this disease is killing way more people per day than *anything* else right now.
A federal judge on Saturday blocked Kansas from limiting attendance at in-person religious worship services or activities to 10 people or fewer to check the spread of the coronavirus, signaling that he believes that it's likely that the policy violates religious freedom and free speech rights.
...
"Public safety is important, but so is following the Constitution," said Tyson Langhofer, senior counsel for the Christian-founded and conservative Alliance for Defending Freedom, which was involved in the case. “We can prioritize the health of safety of ourselves and our neighbors without harming churches and people of faith.”
Kelly’s order limited in-person religious services or activities to 10 congregation members but didn’t limit the number of pastors, choir members and others who could put on the service, so long as they practiced social distancing. Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt, a Republican, warned that it would be unconstitutional to cite or fine churches and pastors for violating Kelly's order.
Smoove_B wrote: Sun Apr 19, 2020 6:47 pm Carry on my wayward son:
A federal judge on Saturday blocked Kansas from limiting attendance at in-person religious worship services or activities to 10 people or fewer to check the spread of the coronavirus, signaling that he believes that it's likely that the policy violates religious freedom and free speech rights.
...
"Public safety is important, but so is following the Constitution," said Tyson Langhofer, senior counsel for the Christian-founded and conservative Alliance for Defending Freedom, which was involved in the case. “We can prioritize the health of safety of ourselves and our neighbors without harming churches and people of faith.”
Kelly’s order limited in-person religious services or activities to 10 congregation members but didn’t limit the number of pastors, choir members and others who could put on the service, so long as they practiced social distancing. Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt, a Republican, warned that it would be unconstitutional to cite or fine churches and pastors for violating Kelly's order.
Bullshit. I hate I have to check but you guessed it...he is a Trump appointed judge. Much like Kavanaugh in the WI poll decision this judge is making fact errors in their ruling to justify a partisan end. Cool.Broomes’ action comes amid strong criticism of the Democratic governor’s order from the Republican-controlled Legislature and increasing pressure from GOP lawmakers to lift at least part of a stay-at-home order for all 2.9 million Kansas residents that took effect March 30 and is set to continue until May 3.
“Churches and religious activities appear to have been singled out among essential functions for stricter treatment,” Broomes wrote in his order.
About that...malchior wrote: Sun Apr 19, 2020 5:14 pm Interesting reddit detective thread about how the covid protests are centrally organized in part. Usually these are dumb but this person put a lot of effort in and I can't see major flaws in his investigation.
To sum it up - he found that many of the domains registered were done from Florida for many states. There are protest Facebook groups all named the same with the same text in the descriptions with minor edits to personalize them for the state - e.g the Governor's name. This is almost exactly how the tea party was 'born' but much quicker.
Reopen Minnesota wrote:t's time to OPEN OUR STATE and STOP Gov Walz' Excessive Quarantine! Politicians are on a power trip, controlling our lives, destroying our businesses, passing laws behind the cover of darkness and forcing us to hand over our freedoms and our livelihood!
ENOUGH! Go to www.ReOpenMN.com and send an email to Tim Walz telling him to stop his excessive quarantine and REOPEN MINNESOTA!Reopen Pennsylvania wrote:It's time to OPEN UP PENNSYLVANIA and STOP Gov Wolf's Excessive Quarantine!
Politicians are on a power trip, controlling our lives, destroying our businesses, passing laws behind the cover of darkness and forcing us to hand over our freedoms and our livelihood!
ENOUGH! Go to www.ReOpenPA.com and send an email to Tom Wolf telling him to stop his excessive quarantine and REOPEN Pennsylvania
News travels fast I guess. Wapo has a story on the Dorr's efforts to coordinate the death cult protests.malchior wrote: Sun Apr 19, 2020 11:23 pm About that. That expert on disinformation may have fell for disinformation. It took literally five seconds to click the links in the quotes and see that there are redirects to astroturf websites set up to collect information. Guess that old hippie set up a website to trick the conservatives...
Like I said the investigation was pretty good. I do those sort of investigations for a living and his results looked solid.
Edit: The Mother Jones reporter is really muddy in his accusation. He is claiming that some of the sites (not all of them) are owned by the old hippie and the redditors are doxxing him. That might be true but the two I linked above are the ones in the original reddit post. Did some idiot redditors pick up the ball and attack someone else? Possibly but that is a side story. Also that hippie story is really weird. He claims he bought up the domains for $4K on his credit card--going into debt--to keep them away from conservatives. That might be true in a truth is stranger than fiction way but it doesn't make much sense.
Edit 2: More information the 2 sites above redirect to existing political lobbyists in MN and PA. I found an additional one for WI. The WI one is linked to a site that belongs to a "gun rights" activist that has been inactive since 2018. They suddenly woke up to start a website with the exact same template as the PA one which links to this site run by this charmer Chris Dorr who runs Gun Rights groups across a half-dozen states including...the MN one as seen here. The MN one is owned by Minnesota Gun Rights which is also run by Chris Dorr according to their tax returns on their web site. The initial investigation hit pay dirt. The dopey aftermath is just noise. Yet I'm sure the journalist will go after the easy target which is dumbass redditors instead of doing the hard work digging into the astroturf campaign.
I figured out the above in 45 minutes once I was pointed in the right direction. Clearly they went down the same path. It seems reasonable to believe there is a chance these guys had a political network that GOP operatives and wealthy backers targeted to get people out on the streets. This was clearly astroturf. I'm impressed with that WaPo story. They pulled a lot of threads together quickly and got it published. Fine work. Let's hope they chase down more of the true backers in time. It is sort of crazy that we are living in the Cyberpunk world that some of us read about as kids.raydude wrote: Mon Apr 20, 2020 7:19 amNews travels fast I guess. Wapo has a story on the Dorr's efforts to coordinate the death cult protests.malchior wrote: Sun Apr 19, 2020 11:23 pm About that. That expert on disinformation may have fell for disinformation. It took literally five seconds to click the links in the quotes and see that there are redirects to astroturf websites set up to collect information. Guess that old hippie set up a website to trick the conservatives...
Like I said the investigation was pretty good. I do those sort of investigations for a living and his results looked solid.
Edit: The Mother Jones reporter is really muddy in his accusation. He is claiming that some of the sites (not all of them) are owned by the old hippie and the redditors are doxxing him. That might be true but the two I linked above are the ones in the original reddit post. Did some idiot redditors pick up the ball and attack someone else? Possibly but that is a side story. Also that hippie story is really weird. He claims he bought up the domains for $4K on his credit card--going into debt--to keep them away from conservatives. That might be true in a truth is stranger than fiction way but it doesn't make much sense.
Edit 2: More information the 2 sites above redirect to existing political lobbyists in MN and PA. I found an additional one for WI. The WI one is linked to a site that belongs to a "gun rights" activist that has been inactive since 2018. They suddenly woke up to start a website with the exact same template as the PA one which links to this site run by this charmer Chris Dorr who runs Gun Rights groups across a half-dozen states including...the MN one as seen here. The MN one is owned by Minnesota Gun Rights which is also run by Chris Dorr according to their tax returns on their web site. The initial investigation hit pay dirt. The dopey aftermath is just noise. Yet I'm sure the journalist will go after the easy target which is dumbass redditors instead of doing the hard work digging into the astroturf campaign.
All countries, ranked per capita deaths, top of the list:malchior wrote: Mon Apr 20, 2020 9:49 am I just heard that Sweden passed us in deaths per million. Time will tell if their experiment succeeds...but what a gamble.
A cluster of coronavirus cases in China’s north-eastern city of Harbin has forced authorities to impose new lockdowns, shattering the country’s run of weeks of reporting near zero domestic transmissions.
You can probably throw out Andorra and San Marino. They are small, microstates in mountains who rely heavily on tourism. With their small size, extremely high testing rates, and tourist to resident ratio they are fairly unique and probably identified the vast majority of domestic case fatalities they had. San Marino gets several million tourists a year. Their population is under 40K. Andorra gets 10M tourists a year with a population of 80K.
I would give it a few months. Eventually, we (the US) will win this ranking too. We will be sooooo sick of the winning.LawBeefaroni wrote: Mon Apr 20, 2020 11:27 amYou can probably throw out Andorra and San Marino. They are small, microstates in mountains who rely heavily on tourism. With their small size, extremely high testing rates, and tourist to resident ratio they are fairly unique and probably identified the vast majority of domestic case fatalities they had. San Marino gets several million tourists a year. Their population is under 40K. Andorra gets 10M tourists a year with a population of 80K.
Sint Maarten may be the same, not sure.
But the point is you can shift everyone up at least 2 spots. Except Belgium, who moves up one spot to the top.
I found the disconnect.
Honestly, I'm kind of scared of it. I mean maybe dying of ebola or H1N1 is more painful but COVID-19 seems like a long slow way to die. Especially with reports of people struggling to breathe. I remember having a severe case of asthma when I was a kid, 3 hours of trying to breathe and my family not knowing what to do. I can't imagine two weeks of that.Skinypupy wrote: Mon Apr 20, 2020 2:05 pm I get more and more infuriated after reading about the protests. The thing that bothers me the most is this idea that people are "hiding" in their homes because they're scared of the virus, and that somehow these "real 'muricans" should have the right to do whatever they want because they aren't scared, dammit.
That's not the case at all.
I'm not "scared" of the virus. Catching it would suck, but it likely wouldn't kill me. No, I'm staying home because I actually give a shit about those around me, and don't want to run the risk of being the person who spreads the virus to someone who it would kill. Those are two entirely different things.
Framing even the slightest bit of empathy as a massive weakness is one of the vile aspects of current conservatives, imo.
Yeah, that's what's terrifying to me. Maybe we get lucky and have a mild / asymptomatic case. But it seems like there's a significant chance that getting it means 1 - 2 weeks of lying in bed hacking my lungs out with my kids unable to get near / touch me, all the while debating whether the symptoms are bad enough to merit a hospital trip and everyone worrying that I might die. Even assuming that I survive (which would be probable), that's goddamn terrifying.YellowKing wrote: Mon Apr 20, 2020 2:31 pm We had a local woman in her 30s with ZERO underlying health conditions recount her battle with it. She was on a ventilator, put into a medically induced coma, and then had to spend a week learning how to walk again after her legs atrophied.
This is what some of the folks who think "I'm young, I don't have to worry" don't get. That woman on the ventilator in a coma who had to re-learn how to walk is in that 98% of "young people who didn't die." Just because you're in that category doesn't necessarily mean you're going to pop a couple of Tylenol and sleep it off.
And then, you know, maybe never recovering fully. The folks thinking this is a friggin' flu are nuts.El Guapo wrote: Mon Apr 20, 2020 2:35 pmYeah, that's what's terrifying to me. Maybe we get lucky and have a mild / asymptomatic case. But it seems like there's a significant chance that getting it means 1 - 2 weeks of lying in bed hacking my lungs out with my kids unable to get near / touch me, all the while debating whether the symptoms are bad enough to merit a hospital trip and everyone worrying that I might die. Even assuming that I survive (which would be probable), that's goddamn terrifying.YellowKing wrote: Mon Apr 20, 2020 2:31 pm We had a local woman in her 30s with ZERO underlying health conditions recount her battle with it. She was on a ventilator, put into a medically induced coma, and then had to spend a week learning how to walk again after her legs atrophied.
This is what some of the folks who think "I'm young, I don't have to worry" don't get. That woman on the ventilator in a coma who had to re-learn how to walk is in that 98% of "young people who didn't die." Just because you're in that category doesn't necessarily mean you're going to pop a couple of Tylenol and sleep it off.
yeah. the permanent lung damage that results in a percentage of recovered cases hasn't been adequately covered.Smoove_B wrote: Mon Apr 20, 2020 2:34 pm We haven't even begun to document the chronic impacts for those that have recovered from a COVID-19 infection. I have no doubts those stories will dominate the media in another ~4 months.