[XogGyux]

Bill Gates put micromachines in the vaccine to cull the population.

And since I upgraded my home computer network to wifi 6, after my vaccine, I have been able to control my smart lights and smart thermostat without asking alexa. All I have to do is lift my vaccinated arm and lights come on, if I lower my arm, lights come off. I have to admit, it has become difficult to take a shower in darkness not being able to keep my arm up through the shower

[SpecialOlympian]

So you're vaccinated. Welcome to the club, Qatz.

[SpecialOlympian]

This is really all you got, isn't it.

I just want to stress that saying "Oh this thing you keep saying that incredibly owns me? That's all you got?" is like one of the weakest positions to start from.

So what vaccination did you get Qatz? Pfizer gave me a t-shirt with mine and I wear it all time.

[QatzelOk]

So what vaccination did you get Qatz? Pfizer gave me a t-shirt with mine and I wear it all time.

I have no response to this intellectual statement of yours.

Perhaps you need to examine some of your epistemological inspriations with sharper eyes and a less prominent add-on red nose.

[SpecialOlympian]

You're being irrational right now Qatz. I think that's a side effect of your vaccine. I don't believe we can trust anything you say while under the sway of vaccine induced mania.

[Rich]

In another humiliating blow to the lockdown liberals Sweden has dropped yet again to 56th in terms of aggregated deaths attributed to Covid per head of population. Note this is exactly what they said would happen, that over time other countries would catch up and even overtake them in terms of death rate. but could the humiliation get even worse for the lockdown Liberals. Oh yes indeed it could! The Lockdown liberals have been effusive in the praise of Germany and Austria's cultural tendencies to unquestioning obedience to authority. So this is why they are utterly terrified of Austria overtaking Sweden in terms of death rate.

[Godstud]

Sweden Population 11 million.

Yes, because people dying is what Cuntservatives crave. Australia is 168, but I guess lockdowns don't work for idiots.

[SpecialOlympian]

Haha, owned again libs! Now that enough people have died Sweden, a country I don't live in with universal health care is winning! This is totally replicable in America!

[Drlee]

In another humiliating blow to the lockdown liberals Sweden has dropped yet again to 56th in terms of aggregated deaths attributed to Covid per head of population. Note this is exactly what they said would happen, that over time other countries would catch up and even overtake them in terms of death rate. but could the humiliation get even worse for the lockdown Liberals. Oh yes indeed it could! The Lockdown liberals have been effusive in the praise of Germany and Austria's cultural tendencies to unquestioning obedience to authority. So this is why they are utterly terrified of Austria overtaking Sweden in terms of death rate.

Who pays you to post this drive. I guess finding stupid people to try to destroy a country is not that hard.

Which vaccine did you get?

There are 800,000 Americans and 5.5 million "others" who can only have freedom if they claw themselves out of the casket.

You should see someone die alone from this disease. You would find it exhilarating if your posts are any measure of your psychopathic trolling. The fun part is watching some 6 year old watch her father needlessly die via Facetime.

[QatzelOk]

In another humiliating blow to the lockdown liberals Sweden has dropped yet again to 56th in terms of aggregated deaths attributed to Covid per head of population. Note this is exactly what they said would happen, that over time other countries would catch up and even overtake them in terms of death rate. ...

To a dog, it doesn't matter if chasing a stick "works." What matters is to show your obedience to ensure bigger treats from your well-loved master - the one who locks you in the house for hours on end.

Locking the dog up like this actually makes it more obedient - more loving to THE MASTER.

You're being irrational right now Qatz. I think that's a side effect of your vaccine. I don't believe we can trust anything you say while under the sway of vaccine induced mania.

Does anyone here have even a runny nose or scratchy throat?

Didn't think so.

**thread implodes - taking Western Civilization with it**

[Doug64]

So either I'm on time or really late, depending on whether you ignore the fact that I didn't post last week's numbers. Any road, here's where we stand today:






Also, how are things looking when it comes to the Xi/Omicron variant? Pretty good, actually:

South Africa Hospitalization Rate Plunges in Omicron Wave

South Africa delivered some positive news on the omicron coronavirus variant on Friday, reporting a much lower rate of hospital admissions and signs that the wave of infections may be peaking.

Only 1.7% of identified Covid-19 cases were admitted to hospital in the second week of infections in the fourth wave, compared with 19% in the same week of the third delta-driven wave, South African Health Minister Joe Phaahla said at a press conference.

Health officials presented evidence that the strain may be milder, and that infections may already be peaking in the country’s most populous province, Gauteng.

Still, new cases in that week of the current wave were more than 20,000 a day, compared with 4,400 in the same week of the third wave. That’s further evidence of omicron’s rapid transmissibility, which a number of other countries, such as the U.K., are also now experiencing.

South Africa, which announced the discovery of the variant on Nov. 25, is being watched as a harbinger of what may happen with omicron elsewhere.

Scientists have cautioned that other nations may have a different experience to South Africa as the country’s population is young compared with developed nations. Between 70% and 80% of citizens may also have had a prior Covid-19 infection, according to antibody surveys, meaning they could have some level of protection.

Currently there are about 7,600 people with Covid-19 in South African hospitals, about 40% of the peak in the second and third waves. Excess deaths, a measure of the number of deaths against a historical average, are just below 2,000 a week, an eighth of their previous peak.

“We are really seeing very small increases in the number of deaths,” said Michelle Groome, head of health surveillance for the country’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases.

More than 90% of hospital deaths were among the unvaccinated or partially vaccinated, News24 reported, citing Waasila Jassat, a researcher with the NICD.

The number of Covid-19 hospitalizations in this wave is also being inflated by the fact that milder patients are being admitted because there is room to accommodate them. Many are there for other complaints but are routinely tested, according to health officials.

“We have seen a decrease in a proportion of people who need to be on oxygen,” Jassat said at the press conference. “They are at very low levels.”

There was also further evidence that the crest of infections may have already passed in Tshwane, the municipal area in Gauteng that includes the capital Pretoria.

A wastewater analysis carried out by the South African Medical Research Council for the week ended Dec. 10 showed a declining proportion of viral particles for two successive weeks at the plant that treats water draining from central Pretoria.

And meanwhile, in rural United States, from The Atlantic:

Where I Live, No One Cares About COVID

In November, my wife asked me whether I had seen an article with the remarkable headline “Is It Safe to Go to Thanksgiving Dinner?”

“Is that from last year?” I asked.

“No, it’s a few days old,” she said, her voice sinking to a growling murmur. “These people.”

I am old enough to remember the good old days when holiday-advice pieces were all variations on “How to Talk to Your Tea Party Uncle About Obamacare.” As Christmas approaches, we can look forward to more of this sort of thing, with the meta-ethical speculation advanced to an impossibly baroque stage of development. Is it okay for our 2-year-old son to hug Grandma at a Christmas party if she received her booster only a few days ago? Should the toddler wear a mask except when he is slopping mashed potatoes all over his booster seat? Our oldest finally attended her first (masked) sleepover with other fully vaccinated 10-year-olds, but one of them had a sibling test positive at day care. Should she stay home or wear a face shield? What about Omicron?

I don’t know how to put this in a way that will not make me sound flippant: No one cares. Literally speaking, I know that isn’t true, because if it were, the articles wouldn’t be commissioned. But outside the world inhabited by the professional and managerial classes in a handful of major metropolitan areas, many, if not most, Americans are leading their lives as if COVID is over, and they have been for a long while.

In my part of rural southwest Michigan, and in similar communities throughout the country, this is true not despite but without any noticeable regard for cases; hospitalization statistics, which are always high this time of year without attracting much notice; or death reports. I don’t mean to deny COVID’s continuing presence. (For the purposes of this piece, I looked up the COVID data for my county and found that the seven-day average for positive tests is as high as it has ever been, and that 136 deaths have been attributed to the virus since June 2020.) What I wish to convey is that the virus simply does not factor into my calculations or those of my neighbors, who have been forgoing masks, tests (unless work imposes them, in which case they are shrugged off as the usual BS from human resources), and other tangible markers of COVID-19’s existence for months—perhaps even longer.

Indeed, in my case, when I say for a long while, I mean for nearly two years, from almost the very beginning. In 2020, I took part in two weddings, traveled extensively, took family vacations with my children, spent hundreds of hours in bars and restaurants, all without wearing a mask. This year my wife and I welcomed our fourth child. Over the course of her pregnancy, from the first phone call to the midwife a few months after getting a positive pregnancy test until after delivery, the subject of the virus was never raised by any health-care professional, including her doula, a dear friend from New York.

Meanwhile, our children, who have continued to attend their weekly homeschooling co-op since April 2020, have never donned masks, and they are distinctly uncomfortable on the rare occasions when they see them, for reasons that, until recently, child psychologists and other medical experts would have freely acknowledged. They have continued seeing friends and family, including their great-grandparents, on a weekly basis. As far as I can tell, they are dimly aware that “germs” are a remote cause of concern, but only our oldest, who is 6, has any recollection of the brief period last year when public Masses were suspended in our diocese and we spent Sunday mornings praying the rosary at home.

The CDC recommends that all adults get a booster shot; I do not know a single person who has received one. When I read headlines like “Here’s Who May Need a Fourth COVID-19 Vaccine Dose,” I find myself genuinely reeling. Wait, there are four of them now? I would be lying if I said I knew what all the variants were or what differences exist between them. (They all sound like the latest entry in some down-market action franchise: Tom Clancy’s Delta Variant: A Jack Ryan Novel, Transformers 4: Rise of the Omicron.) COVID is invisible to me except when I am reading the news, in which case it strikes me with all the force of reports about distant coups in Myanmar.

Granted, my family’s experience of 2020 was somewhat unusual. But I wager that I am now closer to most of my fellow Americans than the people, almost absurdly overrepresented in media and elite institutions, who are still genuinely concerned about this virus. And in some senses my situation has always been more in line with the typical American’s pandemic experience than that of someone in New York or Washington, D.C., or Los Angeles.

The best example of this fact, apart from the agita about holiday travel, is outdoor masking. Prescinding from the question of whether there was ever any meaningful evidence in favor of outdoor transmission, let me point out that until I found myself in Washington, D.C., on a work trip in March, I had never seen anyone wearing a mask outside. For someone who had never worn one in any situation, it was bizarre to find thousands of people indifferently donning these garments outdoors, including those walking alone or in pairs at night after leaving bars or restaurants where they had presumably taken them off. It was even stranger seeing people recognize one another in the street and pull their masks down casually, sometimes but not always before stopping to engage in conversation, like Edwardian gentlemen doffing their top hats.

I came away from this experience with the impression that, whatever their value, masks long ago transcended public health and became a symbol, not unlike In This House We Believe signs or MAGA hats. This, no doubt, is why in my part of America, the only people one ever sees with masks are brooding teenagers seated alone in coffee shops, who seem to have adopted masks to set themselves apart from the reactionary banality of life in flyover country in the same way that I once scribbled anti-Bush slogans on T-shirts. The survival of such old-fashioned adolescent angst is, at any rate, deeply heartening.

As far as my wife and I are concerned, an atmosphere of parochialism hangs upon relentless adherence to CDC directives. By European standards, hand-wringing about masks in schools is as silly and absurdly risk-averse as the American medical establishment’s insistence that pregnant women not drink coffee or wine. Indeed, there is something small-minded and puritanical and distinctly American about the whole business of obsessing over whether vaccinated teachers remove their face covering during a long school day. (When I read such things, I experience the same secondhand embarrassment I felt upon witnessing an American tourist in Rome ask a waiter at a trattoria to remove the ashtray from the outdoor table at which the employee in question had just been smoking.)

I am always tempted to ask the people who breathlessly quote what various public-health authorities are now saying about masking and boosters whether they know how the National Institutes of Health defines a “problem drinker”? The answer is a woman who has more than one “unit” of alcohol a day, i.e., my wife and nearly all of my female friends. These same authorities, if asked, would probably say that considerable risks are associated with eating crudos or kibbeh nayyeh, or taking Tylenol after a hangover. (This is to say nothing of cannabis, which is of course still banned at the federal level.) My point is that sophisticated adults are generally capable of winking at overly stringent guidelines. In the case of COVID, many are not.

I wish I could convince myself that for once in my life with COVID we were actually experiencing a healthy break from the usual pattern, according to which the latest silly novelties—no-fault divorce, factory-sliced bread, frozen meals, and, of course, infant formula—are adopted enthusiastically by the upper middle classes, who then think better of them by the time the lower orders come around.

But I am afraid that the future, at least in major metropolitan areas, is one in which sooner or later elites will acknowledge their folly while continuing to impose it on others. I, for one, would not be surprised if for years to come it were the expectation in New York and California that even vaccinated workers in the service industry wear masks, the ultimate reification of status in a world in which casual dress has otherwise erased many of what were once our most visible markers of class.

After all, you never know how they spent their Thanksgiving.

[QatzelOk]

Imagine if our countries had no governments, and that private corporationsTM were making all the rules based on profit-generating schemes cooked up behind closed doors.

Just imagine what that would be like...

Would it be any different than what we are now experiencing?



"You must take experimental patent number 6449B! You must take it again! And again!

And remember that non-patented, inexpensive remedies are toxic, dangerous, and maybe Communist as well."

[Rancid]

Imagine if our countries had no governments, and that private corporationsTM were making all the rules based on profit-generating schemes cooked up behind closed doors.

This is where we are heading. Corporate authoritarianism. Eventually, we will see governments start to delegate their power to corporations (Texas will lead this, most likely). Slowly, governments will become obsolete. It's going to be a good time.

BTW, that graphic of yours is super old. The list should have Musk and Bezos towards the top.

[XogGyux]

Imagine if our countries had no governments, and that private corporationsTM were making all the rules based on profit-generating schemes cooked up behind closed doors.

Just imagine what that would be like...

Would it be any different than what we are now experiencing?



"You must take experimental patent number 6449B! You must take it again! And again!

And remember that non-patented, inexpensive remedies are toxic, dangerous, and maybe Communist as well."

You speak as if this was some dystopian future. The reality is, this is our past. Ever heard of East India company?
If anything, today it is better than then. Why so pessimistic?
We need to have some optimism in our lives, otherwise, it will come to happen, a self-fullfilling prophecy.

[QatzelOk]

You speak as if this was some dystopian future. The reality is, this is our past. Ever heard of East India company?

Yes I have. And the Hudson Bay company. And the others that killed so many native people to get access to trendy resources.

These early multinational corporation were responsible for many genocides.

And this is not only our past and dystopic future, it is also our PRESENT.

That was my point. We are led by lying corporate psychos who should not be respected or believed.

[XogGyux]

Yes I have. And the Hudson Bay company. And the others that killed so many native people to get access to trendy resources.

These early multinational corporation were responsible for many genocides.

And this is not only our past and dystopic future, it is also our PRESENT.

That was my point. We are led by lying corporate psychos who should not be respected or believed.

Corporations? Monarchies? Dictatorships? Do you see a trend? It is people that make up those groups. Congratulations, you just figured out that people can do both good things and bad things. The point is, over time, we have improved, there is still quite a long way ahead of US, but just crying and complaining won't move the needle I reckon.

[QatzelOk]

The point is, over time, we have improved...

Where has that point ever been proven in this thread? You think just by saying it, that it's true?

Corporations? Monarchies? Dictatorships? Do you see a trend? It is people that make up those groups. Congratulations, you just figured out that people can do both good things and bad things.

What you haven't noticed is that those things you mention - those organizations - are very specific ways of organizing humans. So if a bad type of organization leads to - uh extinction or poverty or non-stop wars - then humans are capable of eradicating those institutions.

Or else get eradicated by them.

The WHO has become a private profit-generator under Entrepreneur Gates and his mega-capitalist gang. I don't doubt that these same people could "do good," but no if organized into multinational corporations who regularly get bribed by the mafia who rented Jeffrey Epstein his plane.

[XogGyux]

Where has that point ever been proven in this thread? You think just by saying it, that it's true?

I think so. Has it been proven? Does it really need to be proven? I am comfortably just stating it as a matter of fact and if you truly, genuinely want proof perhaps it can be debated. But I don't think it is necessary.

[QatzelOk]

I think so. Has it been proven? Does it really need to be proven? I am comfortably just stating it as a matter of fact and if you truly, genuinely want proof perhaps it can be debated. But I don't think it is necessary.

Unless you have been time-travelling for the last few years, and equipped with some machine that measures happiness, you can't even use "we have improved" as a way of justifying the status quo.

It's very poor methodology, to base a very serious point on "what I learned by watching Pepsi commercials for decades of my life - we are the Pepsi generation! Better, stronger, faster! Go, new generation, go!"

It's like saying that the USA is number one, and basing this on a giant styrofoam hand you saw at a baseball game.

[Rich]

Which vaccine did you get?

I had no vaccine. I had the China virus mild back in July, although it did take me 3 and a half weeks to get back to work. I've never taken a flu vaccine and have never had flu. I don't think I've even had a full on cold for a few years now. I'm a moderate, I'm not an anti pharmaceutical fanatic. I had a local anaesthetic a few years back and I took a course of maybe nine Ibuprofen a decade or so back.

One of my house mates had Covid more recently. I'm now resolved to expose myself as many Covid infections as possible, when I'm not in contact with someone vulnerable, to keep my anti Covid strength up. Modern medicine has achieved great wonders, but every medical intervention weakens the body, psyche and spirit. Its funny but so many people who question the sustainability of carbon fuel consumption and even our industrial world, never question the sustainability of our medical system. There were already signs pre Covid that life expectancy might be reaching a peak and that the health of our populations is actually starting to degenerate.