It's not
about being liberal or conservative anymore y'all. That is a hype offered by the fascist whores who want to confuse the people with lies while they turn this country into an aristocratic police state. Some people will say anything to attain power and money. There is no such thing as the Liberal Media, but the Corporate media is very real.
COVID-19 is not the flu. Hence all of the assumptions by which we characterize the COVID that come from our understanding of the flu are inherently not valid.
“Wait. I can catch Covid twice?” my 50-year-old patient asked in disbelief. It was the beginning of July, and he had just tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, for a second time — three months after a previous infection.
While there’s still much we don’t understand about immunity to this new illness, a small but growing number of cases like his suggest the answer is yes.
Covid-19 may also be much worse the second time around. During his first infection, my patient experienced a mild cough and sore throat. His second infection, in contrast, was marked by a high fever, shortness of breath, and hypoxia, resulting in multiple trips to the hospital.
Coronavirus antibodies won't keep you from getting the virus again, says a Central Jersey doctor reporting that at least two of his patients have been reinfected with coronavirus after testing negative for months in between.
Dr. Stuart Ditchek, who treats patients in Deal and surrounding parts of Monmouth County, said in a Wednesday night video posted here on YouTube, "We now have two cases that are reinfected that I am personally connected with."
Ditchek said the first patient had COVID-19 a few months ago, tested negative for months in between, went to a party last weekend, and then tested positive for coronavirus this week. "So that is a reinfection," the doctor said.
According to the CDC, the body's immune response to COVID-19 is not yet understood.
"Patients with MERS-CoV are unlikely to be re-infected shortly after they recover, but it is not yet known whether similar immune protection will be observed for patients with COVID-19," the CDC said.
Granted, these stories are anecdotal, but this is a novel virus, so we cannot assume that the Covid virus acts exactly the same as the influenza virus. Ask yourself : When you get a cold, are you immune from catching a cold again, or even in the same year? Some virus's remain dormant in our bodies for years, and then reappear. Some viruses mutate more frequently than others, but all virus's mutate, so the COVID you have today may not be the same as the COVID one year from now.
I discuss the Rate of Transmission, or growth factor.
The skinny: greater than 1 equals increase; less than 1 equals decrease.
Monday, 29 June 2020 at 16h 17m 26s
The Deficit Myth
Here is Stephanie Kelton doing a superb job at exposing this myth.
The skinny: Libertarians are used by the plutocracy to hijack the discussion in order to benefit from the way economics and government spending/debt is understood. Sadly it is also dysfunctional, and yields a growing rigid aristocracy over time with an eroding socio-economic structure (infrastructure, small business, good jobs, etc.) because excess funds tend to be horded by the wealthy and not really "invested".
This zombie idea posits that it is the wealthy only which invest and create economic progress, absent of anything government spending/debt can and/or does -- despite actual historical fact. The taxes on the rich are meant to obtain funds in order to make these necessary investments. When the wealthy eschew taxes, the government is forced to sell treasury bonds so that the same wealthy can buy them and earn interest to boot.
Now think about that. Instead of paying taxes, the same money the government could have raised by taxes is used to buy the government bonds, and the government then pays the bond-holders. Then when the government creates debts, these same wealthy bond-holders scream about deficits and responsibility. They hijack the government with this tautology and then pretend to be the patrician responsible adults in the room.
Here's an idea : How about just pay the taxes instead of selling bonds to the wealthy in the first place? I get that using bonds to fund government operations is solid economics, however it think it becomes dysfunctional when it begins to take the place of obtaining taxes. The wealth of a society must be used for the maintenance of that society, not just a cash cow to suck out wealth and create various enormous plutocratic enterprises carving out their own private spheres from the commonwealth.
Monday, 22 June 2020 at 1h 31m 35s
60 minutes from 28 September 2003
This was 17 years ago.
A small Texas town saw 13% of its black population arrested and charged with dealing cocaine. But a state judge in 2003 said the investigator behind the arrests was "the most devious, non-responsive law enforcement witness this court has witnessed in 25 years on the bench in Texas."
Tuesday, 9 June 2020 at 16h 51m 36s
Our World In Data timeline of COVID
This covid tracker measures the number of new confirmed cases per day beginning when the rate was 30 cases per day, starting as early as 22 February 2020 all the way up to the current date (which is 9 June 2020 right now). Additionally, the tracker measures the number of tests per case, and colors the tracking lines based upon the tests per case rate. After 60 days the differences in ability to control the outbreak is largely split above and below the 100 confirmed cases per day rate, with the high tests per case below 100, and the low tests per case above 100. Hmmmmm.
In other words, the most successful way to control the virus is to test everyone, quarantine, and trace.
What is shocking, beginning at the 20th day since 7 March 2020 (not every nation's dataset starts at 22 February), the United States is the only nation to have more than 10,000 confirmed cases per day every single day since that 20th day up until now (60 days or more later) -- while only testings just 20 to 40 per case -- which is the middle range on the color scale siena to red to orange to blue to black.
Saturday, 6 June 2020 at 23h 38m 6s
The Second Street Cut
The history of any city is filled with little known matters that are no longer visible hundreds of years later. I have been reading a lot of old San Francisco history today from an awesome website foundsf.org. It's a collection of a plethora of old photos and historical essays about the history of San Francisco.
Right now I'm reading about how a lot of the sand hills between Market and Harrison East of 9th Street were leveled to both flatten the area and fill in the coastal marshes on the East side. The habit actually started a huge discussion about the matter.
The grading was messy work, adding yet more mud to the as yet unpaved streets of the young City and, as the Alta of January 8, 1863 warned, threatening to compromise the natural beauty of San Francisco:
"For twelve years we've had the levelling of hills...The city was laid out by those who believe there is no beauty in anything topographical but dead level, and streets running at right angles...a wiser community would have tried to make their streets suit the topography of the site."
Rincon Hill as a result is now barely 40% of what it used to be. The above source is a story about why the city decided to cut into the Western side of Rincon hill in 1869, something called the "2nd Street Cut."
The Second Street Cut through Rincon Hill was made in 1869. Behind the plans for a cut was the wealthy land owner, John Middleton. He felt that a flat passage to the Pacific Mail Wharves at the southern end of Second Street would increase that street's commercial appeal and the value of his own lot at Second and Bryant (now 501 Second, an office building). Through a series of political and business connections and also due to his affiliation with many of the City's social clubs, Middleton got himself elected to the State Assembly and quickly introduced AB 444, authorizing San Francisco's Board of Supervisors to modify and change the grades of streets as they saw fit.
Here is the city in 1868, looking South down Second street. That little hump in the distance was cut through in 1869.
Friday, 5 June 2020 at 19h 29m 3s
What the fuck?
A 75 year old man is pushed to the curb, and lays bleeding while the police thugs walk by and do nothing.
Was this 75 year old man a member of the "anti-fa" ?
Thursday, 4 June 2020 at 23h 24m 6s
Fuck you Tucker
Here's what this fucker said about Minneapolis:
But what are the national numbers on this? Well, actually, we know the answer. A study from last year found that white police officers were less likely to shoot and kill nonwhite suspects than nonwhite police officers were.
Researchers are raising red flags about a recent study on race and deadly encounters with police in the United States, highlighting the difficulties in measuring racial bias. The study claimed that white police were no more likely than their nonwhite colleagues to shoot minorities. But now, other researchers say the study was flawed and that it adds little to the debate over whether minorities have a greater chance of getting shot by police than white civilians.
“It’s just a completely indefensible conclusion to draw from the data that’s available,” says Dean Knox, a political scientist at Princeton University who published a critique of the study this month. To begin to justify such a claim, he says, researchers would need to know how often black and white civilians encounter police officers—something the authors of the original study did not consider in the paper.
Another criticism: The study did not investigate the possibility that all police—white and nonwhite—could be biased in shooting black men, says psychologist Phillip Atiba Goff at the Center for Policing Equity and John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. “It’s not a serious framing of bias to think that white people have bias and other people don’t,” he says.
...In the original study, published on 22 July in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers at Michigan State University and the University of Maryland compiled a list of more than 900 fatal U.S. police shootings in 2015 using crowdsourced databases from The Washington Post and The Guardian. Then, they asked police departments for information about the race of the officers responsible for the shootings. They found black police were more likely to kill black civilians than white civilians. However, the same held true for white and Hispanic officers: Each group of police was likelier to shoot civilians of their own race. That’s likely true, the researchers say, because police tend to be drawn from the communities they work in and are thus more likely to have deadly encounters with civilians of the same race.
Really Tucker?
Systemic racism is not a myth. Here's all the data you need to see.
You have to compare the rates, not the raw numbers. Lets say 3 cuban baseball outfielders hit 40+ home runs, and 6 non-cuban outfielders hit 40+ home runs. If there are only 10 cuban outfielders (30%) in the league versus 50 non-cuban outfielders (12%), there must be something significant about cuban players.
At the same rate depicted in the graphic above, the population of Black people would have to be 80.3 million people in order to equal the same number of white deaths by police -- which is still only 40% of the total white population of 197 million.
12 times 2.5 equals 30. 12 times 2 is almost 23. Black people are almost 3 times more likely to be killed by cops. Hispanic people are twice as likely. HOWEVER; according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics for 2018 (page 12) 50.2% of violent incidents were due to white offenders, 21.7% Black, and 14.4% Hispanic.
Furthermore, according to the same BJS report for 2018, the percentage of offenders out of the total population for each of these 3 ethic groups is 3% Black, 1.6% Hispanic, and 1.5% Caucasian. Relative to each ethnic group, Blacks are only twice more likely to be a violent offender, and Hispanics are roughly equal.
1.5 times 2.5 is not 3%. 1.5 times 2 is not 1.6%.
Now 3 percent is small, but why are Blacks twice more likely that both Whites & Hispanics, you might ask. Well looking at the Bureau of Labor Statistics Black people are nearly twice more likely to be unemployed.
The linkage between poverty and crime is solid, unlike what Herr Carlson chooses to push to the racists who watch his show in order to keep them ignorant and non-self-reflective.
Fuck you Tucker Carlson.
Wednesday, 3 June 2020 at 2h 3m 51s
Excellent discussion of American Aparteid
Walter Isaacson of Tulane University interviews Bryan Stevenson, a leading civil rights lawyer from Montgomery, Alambama.
Sunday, 31 May 2020 at 21h 44m 48s
Malcolm X Speech 20 May 1962
On 27 April 1962 two members of the Nation of Islam are questioned by Los Angeles police while unloading suitcases from a car in front of their mosque. A scuffle occurs and after gun fire 7 mosque members were wounded with one man shot dead by the police.