Hire me, I'm a woman

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-20T01:59:02+00:00

That's an extremely complicated way of saying "the left has no sense of humour" 😉

But seriously, I've seen many funny liberal memes, and many funny conservative memes. Anyone who can't see the humour in both is letting their ideology control them.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-20T01:54:26+00:00

Right-o, time to explain the joke for the humour-impaired.

The joke rests of the conflict between two principles of the modern social justice movement:

That corporations and employers ought to ensure that they do not discriminate against women in hiring, and (particularly in white-collar work) any deviation from a 50:50 ratio of men to women is likely to be treated as evidence for discrimination due to sexism.
- the corollary of that is that if two equally qualified candidates apply for one position, and one is a man and the other a woman, employers may sometimes give preference to the woman candidate in order to bring that sex ratio closer to even.
And the principle that we should not "assume gender" and that just because somebody presents as a man (or woman) that does not mean that they really are a man (or woman), the pronouns they use may not reflect their "real sex", and that many non-binary or trans people have not "come out" and it may be triggering to require them to.

If there are any other jokes you need explained, please don't hesitate to ask.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-20T01:35:49+00:00

"Never"?

It is a demonstrable fact that until recently, men have been paid much more for literally the same work as women. We're not talking about the illusionary "pay gap" which is due to men statistically working longer hours with fewer career breaks, we're talking about a man and a woman doing the identical job where the woman is paid half the hourly rate or less.

And I'm not talking about ancient history back in the 1600s or the Middle Ages, I'm talking about only a few decades ago, in the memory of people who are still alive.

Denial of true facts is a terrible thing.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-20T01:18:51+00:00

This video is an absolute time capsule gem! A man pretending to be a woman pretending to be a soldier pretending to win a pretend war.

There's nothing "pretend" about the war in Ukraine. The hundreds of thousands of dead Ukrainian and Russian soldiers, and even more who are permanently injured, prove that.

They could have had peace early in 2022 if Boris Johnson hadn't convinced Zelensky to reject Putin's offer to negotiate a peaceful settlement to the war.

They could have avoided the war if NATO was willing to offer Russia security guarantees.

They could have avoided the war if Ukraine had lived up to the Minsk Accords.

But NATO wanted war, and Ukraine, as their catspaw, is suffering the consequences.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-20T00:53:56+00:00

You're not wrong.

There are over 200 known viruses that cause what we call "the common cold". About 80% of cases are caused by one of many different rhinoviruses. About 15% of cases are from coronaviruses, and the rest are from adenoviruses, orthopneumoviruses and assorted others.

Pre-2020, there were four common cold coronaviruses. Since the omicron strain of Covid, there are now five.

By the way, Japan has already downgraded Covid to the same level of concern as the seasonal flu.

Interestingly, a very similar thing may have happened in 1889, when the "Russian Flu" epidemic may have been another coronavirus, which like Covid started off as deadly and soon became just a cold.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-19T18:15:50+00:00

I assume the standard process is cosmetic surgery to make the most prominent genitals the only ones.

Intersex does not mean that the person has a two sets of genitals, one male and one female.

"Intersex" refers to many different developmental disorders which affect the expression of sex. Some of these conditions are rarely detected because they may cause infertility but no other obvious signs.

The Intersex Society of North American recommends that disorders that directly impact the child (e.g. the lack of an opening for the urinary tract) should be corrected by surgery but that purely cosmetic surgery to match some stereotype of "normality" should be delayed until the child is old enough to understand the risks and decide for themselves.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-19T18:13:20+00:00

Unfortunately, in the US some outdated practices that can involve lying to the patient and their parents, and unnecessary, harmful surgery, are still being applied. For example, if the doctor thinks that a girl baby has a clitoris which is "too big", they will recommend a clitoridectomy (surgical reduction of the clitoris by removing some or all of it). This can have devastating results on the woman's ability to feel sexual pleasure and orgasm.

The Intersex Society of North American recommends that disorders that directly impact the child (e.g. the lack of an opening for the urinary tract) should be corrected by surgery but that purely cosmetic surgery to match some stereotype of "normality" should be delayed until the child is old enough to understand the risks and decide for themselves.

CC u/DerpDerp3001

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-19T18:01:53+00:00

Intersex has nothing to do with "third sex" or "gender identity".

Intersex covers many different disorders of development which may, or may not, need treatment. The right approach will depend on which specific condition they have and what disorders occur because of that.

The Intersex Society of North American recommends that disorders that directly impact the child (e.g. the lack of an opening for the urinary tract) should be corrected by surgery but that purely cosmetic surgery to match some stereotype of "normality" should be delayed until the child is old enough to decide what they want themselves.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-19T16:11:13+00:00

Intersex covers a huge variety of conditions. It depends on what specific condition the child has.

Have a long, long talk with experts on intersex conditions and don't let any doctor push me into immediate surgery. Talk to people in intersex support groups to find out what to expect.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-19T11:11:22+00:00

And they spent years hunting down and interviewing thousands of women to get those 4 cases

Perfectly normal.

Barely a day goes by without the police knocking on my door to ask whether or not I've been the victim of a crime:

"Good evening, we are conducting an investigation into an alleged car theft by Benny Brown. Have you ever had your car stolen by Benny?"
"Hi, we are investigating whether or not George Smith committed assault last Tuesday, and we're wondering whether he beat you too at some time. Not necessarily on Tuesday, it might have happened any time."
"Hello again, today we're investigating Henry Higgins for burglary. I don't suppose he's burgled your house too? Can you give us a list of items he stole?"

The cops always do this. Don't they?

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-19T09:59:24+00:00

Even the Ukrainian Cokehead In Chief Zelensky isn't desperate enough to ask for F-35s.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-19T09:55:21+00:00

Some women think they are a higher risk of random violence than men

Women do have a higher risk of random violence than men. As a guy, the odds of somebody dragging me into the bushes and raping me is pretty negligible.

But men have a much higher risk of non-random violence especially those associated with other criminal activities.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-19T09:50:39+00:00

the disproportionate number of troons who went into dangerous sex work.

And even they have a much, much lower murder rate than actual woman sex workers. Oh sorry, "bonus hole" sex workers.

Because the average pychopath murdering misogynist gets off on killing women, not men cosplaying women, and in places where sex work is illegal, sex workers are especially vulnerable.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-19T09:46:44+00:00

All kidding aside, I've seen a post on Reddit from a male transsexual fantasying about being gang raped and beaten by men.

I mean, whatever gets you hard man, I'm not going to shame your kink. But there's a time and and a place.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-19T09:09:59+00:00

Even Ukraine isn't desperate enough to ask for F-35s yet.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-19T09:02:31+00:00

The story stinks like a bucket of prawns left out in the sun. My sense is that if it is not entirely made up, it is so inaccurate that it might as well be made up.

Even if the woman was smoothed with a pillow -- unlikely in a case of assisted dying / voluntary euthanasia -- the thing with being smothered is that the pillow muffles any sound and the woman is unlikely to have been able to scream at all, let alone loudly enough to be heard in another room.

One report claims that an autopsy found that Wattiez died of asphyxiation, not because of the drugs they were supposed to use. Hmm, that's a bit worrying, but reportedly the autopsy found that multiple nurses "took turns" suffocating the woman which is ridiculous, an autopsy cannot determine how many people took part!

Having said all that, there are certainly cases of very shady, if not illegal, actions by hospitals, doctors and nurses. So I'm not ruling out a botched case of euthanasia, or even murder. But the story as reported is clearly sensationalised and very likely inaccurate.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-19T08:52:26+00:00

And that's not dragging the conversation down? 🙄

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-09T02:28:39+00:00

and idiot humans have no part in that ?

The anthropogenic word in "Anthropogenic global warming" means "man made", so of course idiot humans have a part in this.

in the US greenies policy not letting brush be cleared and trees cut down near power lines

Yeah, I use that excuse whenever the missus nags me to cut the lawn. "Sorry dear, the greenies won't let me."

Blaming the greens for power company failure is a common trick. Funny enough, nobody can actually point to the actual law that prevents power companies keeping their power lines safe. It's always just rumour: "the greenies won't let 'em".

In any case, that's irrelevant to my comment. Failure to maintain the lines isn't going to bring bushfire season forward by four or five months. To get bushfires and wildfires you need two things: there has to be fuel (leaf litter, twigs, dead branches etc), and the conditions have to be right.

If the fuel has more than 30% moisture content, you cannot get a wildfire. If the moisture content falls below 10%, its a bomb waiting to go off.

It used to take four or five months from the end of winter to the point that you can have bushfires in Australia. Now it happens in just a month or two. That's nothing to do with greenies preventing power companies from maintaining the safety of their power lines.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-09T02:06:41+00:00

I guess you did too much LDS since the 2000s to have missed the CLIMATE CHANGE relabeling

Yes, it's true, I've done a lot on Mormons since the 2000s, they're nearly as kinky as Catholic school girls.

"Climate Change" has always been the more common term, back to the 60s and 70s and there has never been a time that "global warming" was more popular.

You might not realise this if your experience only goes back to the early 2000s on the internet, where google searches for "global warming" were more popular for a few years. But trust me, there is more to life than what people see on the internet.

But why do you care so much over such a trivial fact? If the planet warms, the climate will change.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-08T11:02:15+00:00

the West has been reluctant to supply all the weapons Ukraine wants.

There are four major reasons the west is reluctant to give Ukraine everything they have asked for:

Fear of escalating this from a local war that (according to US/NATO hopes) will wear Russia down, to a Europe-wide war, or worse, a nuclear world war. The idea is to bog Russia down in a war they are losing, but without pushing them into all-out war.
Fear that some or all of these weapons will end up in the hands of white-supremacist uber-nationalist Nazis who may not be satisfied with only killing Russians and might use them to commit crimes or terrorist attacks against people in the west. Not everyone has forgotten the lesson of the CIA funding, training and arming al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.
Fear that if they give Ukraine everything they want, they'll empty their own arsenals. At one point, someone from the British MOD pointed out that in a war with Russia Britain would only have a weeks' worth of missiles. President Biden had to admit that the reason the US was shipping cluster bombs to Ukraine was because they had run too low on regular 150mm shells and didn't have any spare they could give Ukraine.
And most importantly, fear that if they give Ukraine all their best weapons, they will be captured by Russia, or worse, they will be seen by the whole world to fail in the battlefield. Exactly what has happened to Leopards, Bradleys, Storm Shadows, Patriots, etc -- they're good, but not great and certainly not worth the huge $$$$ they cost. Bradleys and Strykers are great if you want to terrify civilians and insurgents armed with AK-47s in the back of a Toyota, but going up against a peer adversary they're going to burn.

And that's bad for sales.

Russian incompetence and ferocious Ukrainian resistance saved Ukraine.

It's true that Ukraine has fought hard and bravely, especially at the beginning when they had a 3:2 advantage over the Russian invaders and Russia was still working out their teething troubles.

But really, are you sure you want to play up this "Russian incompetence" angle? They've taken and are holding nearly 20% of Ukraine, they've destroyed two full Ukrainian mobilisations and most of a third, and they've done this fighting with one hand tied behind their back. And they've done it while Ukraine has been given money, arms, training and intelligence from the west.

If Russia is "incompetent", then Ukraine and NATO are even worse.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-08T10:50:58+00:00

Clearly the Trump Organization found some excuse not to pay these people. Tell us their excuse and let us decide how we feel about it.

Good lord, somebody being reasonable and fair-minded on the internet about Trump 😧

A very good point, but when you have a company that has so many horror stories of contractors not getting paid, or only paid a fraction of what they're owed, you have to start wondering.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-08T09:54:59+00:00

Volkswagen was fined just over €1 million

Their revenue in 2022 was €279.2 billion with a b. So about 2 minutes revenue. I'm sure that will teach Volkswagen to mend their ways.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-08T09:53:54+00:00

Cars with:

internal cameras
internal microphones
other sensors inside the vehicle
phone apps
and let's not forget GPS tracking

What is this bullshit? Who needs this fucking shit in a car?

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-08T09:21:26+00:00

"My job as an insurance adjuster was to deny people's insurance claims by any means possible. Now that I'm retired, I'm bored and I miss fucking with people's lives, so when the state government offered me a couple of grand in unmarked, non-sequential twenty dollar bills, I jumped at the opportunity.

"Remember folks, anyone questioning the government's response to the fires is a dumb-ass tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist who believes in space lasers."

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-06T12:39:47+00:00

What's "jew media"? Is that like "jew sport", "jew coffee", "jew bananas"?

I don't have any friends in the media, let alone Jewish ones.

And I don't give a shit about the Stormy Daniels affair.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-06T12:28:47+00:00

It is Ukraine's war.

It certainly is. They've had since 2014 to avoid war, maybe even 2008 if you go all the way back to the first attempted US coup, er sorry we're supposed to call it the "Color Revolution" 😉 but at every step the west Ukrainians have been willing patsies for the US imperium.

They fucked around and now they're finding out.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-06T11:27:56+00:00

So the mighty Challenger II, the supposed invincible game-changer, burns just as well as the Leopard and Bradley.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-06T11:12:02+00:00

From the article:

He points out that the trees have had the moisture sucked out of them, much like a microwave oven does to a piece of bread.

Has he never actually put bread in the microwave? Jeez what a shithead. Microwaves don't suck moisture out of anything, let alone bread.

He makes note of the fact that the windows in the cars are all melted. That would be impossible for a wildfire, which burns at 1,447 degrees Fahrenheit. It would take a temperature of at least 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit to melt glass.

Glass changes to a soft, plastic state which loses structural integrity at just 500°C or 930°F, but even if the glass doesn't fully melt, windows usually break from the temperature difference.

Bushfires in Australia regularly reach or exceed the melting point of glass, with air temperatures of around 1600°C. A really bad Aussie bushfire will easily melt metal and glass. The flames themselves can be cooler than the surrounding air, as volatile gasses escaping vegetation combust in the air.

The radiant heat alone is sometimes enough to start fires tens of metres away from any flame.

Many of the cars are nowhere near any source of fuel that could burn at that temperature.

rolls eyes

Apart from the vehicle itself, which is full of plastic and leather and gasoline. What a dimwit.

Even gasoline would not burn at that temperature. A hydrocarbon fire in the atmosphere burns at a maximum temperature of 1,517°F; 825°C.

That's just a made-up bullshit non-fact. This clown is just making up shit and pretending to be an expert. He's so full of it that if they gave him an enema what's left of him could fit inside a match box.

Car fires reach 900°C, the average house fire can easily get to 1200°F. An ordinary wood fire can burn at 2000°F or 1090°C, and a propane gas BBQ gets to 3600°F and the flame from a butane gas lighter can exceed 4000°F in ideal conditions.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-06T10:16:13+00:00

"Forensic Arborist" 😂 😃 😀 😉

Why are you posting disinformation designed to discredit people looking at the many, many genuine dodgy things about the Hawaiian response to the fires?

"Everyone look over there, it's a distraction!"

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-06T10:04:19+00:00

Why does anyone give a shit where Obama sticks his dick?

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-05T12:16:01+00:00

Nobody knows what will happen after Robotyne.

“The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet.”

Ukraine's counter-offensive was an attempt to break out of the war of attrition they cannot win with a "Hail Mary" blitzkrieg attack against prepared positions. The odds were always against them and even if they succeeded in driving a wedge through the Russian lines, it is doubtful they could break out into a mobile war -- especially not with the Ukrainian winter coming. Three months later, we know that the counter-offensive has bogged down at its easiest point. It only gets harder from Robotyne on.

Across hundreds of miles of the Zaporizhia front, at huge cost in lives and equipment, Ukraine has managed to take one small village in the screening zone, where they continue to take fire from the Russians who hold the high ground surrounding the village.

The Ukrainian counter-offensive was always based on wishful thinking that Ukrainian lives don't matter and Russia is incompetent. The Wall Street Journal published a story admitting that US/NATO officials knew that Ukraine didn't have the equipment to break through the Russian lines, but hoped that "courage" would make the difference.

That's the story of this war in a nutshell. Ukraine has been sacrificed by the west in a failed attempt to hurt Russia. Ukraine has been the USA's catspaw all along, with no concern for Ukrainian lives, starting with the civilians killed in the Donbas by the west Ukrainians and leading to repeated western sabotage of every single attempt to resolve the situation peacefully. The Geneva agreement, both Minsk accords, Russian attempts to negotiate in 2021, the Russia/Ukrainian peace talks in 2022, every single time.

The Ukrainian conscripts are plenty brave enough, but they're out-gunned by about 5:1 to 10:1, they have no air support (and a handful of F-16s won't make any difference), facing three lines of prepared defences plus a screening zone, against a numerically equal foe that has superior ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) ability. Ukraine cannot execute a major assault without Russia knowing it is coming.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-05T10:28:45+00:00

There's a cordon surrounding Burning Man? As in, to keep people from leaving??? WTF?

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-05T08:55:42+00:00

"Once I'm dead you can bang anyone you like."

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-04T13:38:10+00:00

John’s Hopkins thinks they are dangerous

You mean John Hopkins hospital? Yes, that's who we should be listening to for information about space, a hospital 🙄

It's been know for at least eighty years that the Van Allen belts are dangerous if you take no precautions.

And of course space travel in general is dangerous. There are hundreds of things that can kill you if you are unlucky, and that includes the Van Allen belts.

we didn’t even go to the moon

And your credibility level drops from Low to Non Existent.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-04T13:32:11+00:00

which is the only reason they haven't taken over the world completely

Yes, that's the only reason, aside from them being outnumbered 3:1, not being even close to a unified culture, having many internal disputes and disagreements, and that most of them come from developing and under-developed countries that couldn't take over a car park.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-04T13:25:28+00:00

muslims are the ones who gave us slavery also

You think that slavery didn't exist in ancient Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Greece, Rome, etc??? 😂 😂 😂

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-03T15:36:50+00:00

Great article. Thank you.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-03T13:09:52+00:00

Most people, religious or not, have a more than a bit of squick about disabled people having sex. People who have sexual relationships with the disabled are looked at with suspicion, unless the disability occurred after they were already in a permanent relationship. And sometimes even then.

Can you imagine the uproar in the US if Medicare paid the disabled to have sex with sex workers like at least one Australian state does?

I don't think many American religious groups would come right out and explicitly say that the disabled should not have sex. They'd rather than the topic would never come up in polite discussion at all. But they would absolutely push for laws that singled out homosexuals, in the guise of "protecting" the disabled.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-03T12:43:28+00:00

Exactly this.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-03T12:41:07+00:00

There was standing, but the judges refused to look at the evidence that we all saw in real time.

Because the system is intentionally designed so that almost nobody has standing to challenge election results. After Jill Stein of the Green Party sought recounts in three states in 2016, the Democrats and Republicans passed bipartisan laws to prevent third parties challenging elections, and severely restricting when and how the losing party can challenge the results.

The bottom line is that the American electoral system is deliberately designed to make it impossible to prove fraud. If you literally filmed electoral workers shovelling ballots into a bonfire, and then just typing whatever numbers they felt like into the computer, you still couldn't challenge the result unless you were the losing candidate, and the losing margin was only a small percentage.

Because they were leftist judges

More than half of them were Republican judges, and two of them were appointed by Trump.

You Americans will never, ever fix your political system so long as you live under the illusion that the choice between your two major parties is not a choice between Kang and Kudos. You have a choice between the Big Business Party that supports never-ending war, and the Never-Ending War Party that supports big business.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-03T10:56:41+00:00

Is there some context to this? What's going on?

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-03T10:55:59+00:00

The majority of Muslims no more give a shit about what Mohammad actually said than the majority of Christians pay any attention to what Jesus supposedly said (if he even existed).

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-03T10:55:26+00:00

22 years after attacking New York City

What, the same people? I thought they all died when the planes crashed. How did the terrorists survive, and why didn't the FBI and the Bush and Obama administrations arrest them?

If they're not the same people, why do you care? Most Muslims are no more responsible for the Sept 11 attacks than most white people are responsible for slavery.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-03T02:00:32+00:00

I too believe every bullshit story written on the internet.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-03T01:02:09+00:00

The SFFD says that an ambulance was blocked in and prevented from leaving the scene of an accident by two autonomous vehicles. The company spokesperson says that there was plenty of room for the ambulance to move. Who knows what really happened in this sort of He Says, She Says report?

First responders do a hard job and 90% of them do a fantastic job. But sometimes they can be Big Girls Blouses.

In my home state, there was a horrific accident where a cop stopped by the side of a freeway was run over and killed in a one in a million accident by a truck driver off his face on speed. The police, and government, immediately over-reacted with a new law that now everyone is supposed to reduce speed to 20kph any time they pass an emergency vehicle stopped on the side of the road, even on freeways, even if you are three lanes away from the parked vehicle.

The new law was so over-the-top even other emergency responders -- ambulance and fire -- said "Steady on, this is a bit much..." but the police and government pushed it through regardless.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-02T14:10:31+00:00

Plaintiffs lack standing

Which is why (almost?) all the challenges to the 2020 election failed. They weren't rejected on their merits, they were dismissed for lack of standing.

The system is working as designed.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-02T14:01:06+00:00

Don't you have to be over 21 to buy alcohol in the US? She looks like she's 15 and acts like she's five.

Attention-seeking. It's all attention-seeking.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-02T13:29:43+00:00

That's unpossible! I get all my news from Imgur and I can categorically tell you that only Republican politicians are crooks.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-02T13:26:56+00:00

Russians are sloppy motherfuckers.

All trips to the ISS are done in Russian Soyez rockets. Without those "sloppy motherfuckers" the EU and US wouldn't be able to put anyone into space at all.

Let's wait and see how many attempts the US needs to successfully re-land on the moon. Artemis 3 has already been delayed at least once.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-02T13:12:57+00:00

we can’t get through the Van Allen radiation belts.

😂 😂 😂

Wait, you're serious? What do they teach kids in school these days? 🙁

We're all exposed to radiation, every second of the day. What matters is the exposure over time.

Even though the radiation levels in the Van Allen belts are relatively high, spacecraft going through them are shielded, reducing the amount of radiation reaching the inside of the ship. In addition, the flight plan for the Apollo program was designed to go through the belt at the thinnest part of the belt, reducing the exposure time. The journey through them is only a few hours, giving a radiation dose equivalent to a chest X-ray or eating 500 bananas.

One chest x-ray isn't fatal. Source: I've had three or four chest x-rays.

For the Apollo program as a whole, the average radiation dose for the astronauts was 0.38 rad or 38000 bananas. That's roughly equivalent to two mammograms or half the dose from a chest CT scan, or about half the average yearly radiation exposure for Americans.

If you assume an average lifetime of 70 years, that means that the Apollo astronauts experienced an average increased lifetime dose of radiation of about 0.7% compared to what they would have got if they had stayed home.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-02T12:41:39+00:00

If a puddle of water ever noticed how it just perfectly fit the hole in the ground, it would surely conclude that the hole was designed that way on purpose for the sake of the puddle.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-02T12:38:47+00:00

What is the point of a VP?

I used to think that being VP was a step up the ladder towards President, but it seems that VPs are more often know-nothing losers promoted up and sidewise to a dead-end job that goes nowhere. Think of Dan Quayle, and the current VP Harris.

In modern US politics (post WW2) has there ever been a VP who went on to become President in his own right?

Enquiring minds want to know.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-01T07:33:27+00:00

No it isn't reasonable.

Uganda has been colonized by reactionary fundamentalist, extremist American Evangelicals. Uganda's extreme anti-gay laws are not grass-roots African culture, but transplanted American Evangelical homophobia.

Homosexuality is a traditional part of African society, with opposition to LGB relationships being imposed on Africa by western colonialism and Islam. In modern Africa, anti-LGB laws such as those in Uganda are mostly driven by the pernicious influence of American conservative religious groups. Uganda is one of the poorest countries in the world which makes them especially vulnerable to wealthy US evangelical groups.

Uganda already had laws against rape, including statutory rape laws to protect children and those who are mentally unable to consent. Which does not include the physically disabled! Physically disabled people are perfectly able to consent to having sexual relationships.

There may be more to this story than meets the eye, but I doubt it.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-01T07:18:27+00:00

Ukraine has taken Robotyne and is still advancing.

Okay, I'll accept that it looks like Ukraine has at last taken the remainder of Robotyne. But remember that this is still a fly-speck in the Zaporizhzhia front. That's about 1km every 11 days, at that rate they might make it to the first Russian defensive line by Christmas.

Getting excited about Robotyne reminds me of this from Blackadder.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-01T05:50:03+00:00

I don't know what to think.

I've been using X (on Linux) since the 1990s. Then Xorg and presumably now Wayland.

Back in the 90s, my Linux boxen were stable as hell. Unless the power went out, nothing ever knocked them over. (No, I tell a lie, I had one machine with bad RAM that would crash randomly.) I had one machine have an uptime of over a year. Now, I'm lucky if my Linux desktop lasts a week without it locking up or falling over, usually because my browser (running as an unprivileged user) manages to choke out the desktop environment and causes it to die.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-01T05:27:45+00:00

Impossible! I saw on Imgur a post claiming that not even Justice Thomas' clerks are defending him. /s

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-01T03:55:35+00:00

Zionist imperialism requires the illusion of antisemitism to justify the Israeli apartheid state and the oppression of Palestinians.

Mossad sockpuppets (motto: "By way of deception thou shalt do war.") spread fake antisemitism all over the internet so they can weaponize it against critics of the Israeli Zionist regime.

How's it going Agent Farshtunkener? How's the weather in Tel Aviv?

weavilsatemyface · 2023-09-01T03:17:48+00:00

Reminder that an insanity plea is not the soft option.

When convicted of a crime, you have a known prison sentence with the possibility of early parole for good behaviour.

With a ruling of not guilty by reason of insanity, there's no fixed sentence. He's going to be locked up at the German state's pleasure, for as long as they want. This guy will probably spend the rest of his life in a high-security psychiatric hospital, doped up to his eyeballs, at the mercy of a panel of psychiatrists.

He's going to be drugged and drooling for the rest of his life, the poor fucker. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.

Well maybe my absolute worst enemy, you know what you did you fucker.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-31T06:33:22+00:00

Everyone is gender non-conforming because there is no One True Way to be a man or woman.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-31T06:29:22+00:00

The petition says "It is not the number of experts but the quality of arguments that counts." Which is good, because 1600 only sounds like a lot of experts if you have no idea how many actual experts in climatology there are, and how many of those 1600 aren't experts at all.

So they fail on the "Quantity" measure. How do they go on "Quality"?

Climate science should be less political

Pure hypocrisy. Its the Denialists, funded by the worst carbon polluters, and their Useful Idiots, who are making this political.

Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming

They do.

politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures

They do. The Denialists shilling for oil companies are just unhappy that the real costs of fossil fuels are being counted, instead of being swept under the carpet.

Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming

Well duh. Nobody says otherwise.

Warming is far slower than predicted
The world has warmed significantly less than predicted by IPCC on the basis of modeled anthropogenic forcing.

Half true. If you take the worst case prediction, the world has warmed less than predicted. If you take the best case prediction, the world has warmed more than predicted and if you take the most likely case, the actual warming is pretty damned close to the prediction.

Climate policy relies on inadequate models

Well, maybe, maybe not, but they're the best we have.

They do not only exaggerate the effect of greenhouse gases, they also ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial.

The first part is just wrong. The second part is Not Even Wrong.

CO2 is plant food, the basis of all life on Earth

Okay, we can stop reading right here. The people making this disingenuous argument aren't arguing in good faith. Anyone claiming to be a scientist who makes this argument is not serious. It's a bullshit answer.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-31T05:41:25+00:00

There are just three climatologists in that list.

Some of the expert scientists on the list include:

Edward Abbott MD, Retired obstetrician
Mitchell R. Childress, Archaeologist
William Robert Detzner, retired special education teacher
Thomas Gyorog, P.E., Project Manager and Designer of transportation infrastructure projects
Jesse Schilling, Certified Management Accountant
József Balla, retired teacher and manager of a small business
David H. Denham, lifetime experience as Architect
Paul S. Forbes, Financial Advice Specialist

My favourite are the ones calling themselves "independent scientist", which means "I have no qualifications, no experience, I don't actually work as a scientist, but I've heard of Albert Einstein".

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-31T05:23:21+00:00

1,600 "scientists" like:

Don Andersen, Retired Teacher, Programmer
József Balla, retired teacher and manager of a small business
David H. Denham, lifetime experience as Architect
Paul S. Forbes, Financial Advice Specialist
Dr. Volkmar Hierner, degree in business administration and economy
Ambassador Jose Brechner, retired Congressman and Ambassador for the Bolivian Government
Dr. Grant Armstrong, Leadership development and coaching
Patrick Hunt, former member of the Royal Canadian Navy
Spyridon Nikiforos, Economist, MBA
Dr Simon Idris Beshir, Cardiologist

I always ask a climatologist for medical advice regarding my heart, so I suppose it is fair that I should listen to a cardiologist for information about climate.

So what we've got here is not 1600 scientists but more like 1600 laymen, engineers, doctors, people with vaguely sciencey degrees who have never worked a day as a scientist, and a few actual scientists, almost all of whom are retired or from completely unrelated specialties.

If you count actual climatologists in this list, you get a grand total of exactly... three.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-31T04:28:19+00:00

Unfortunately dark forces seem to be making sure I can't get very far.

I feel your pain bro. I too wasted so many hours on that game.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-31T03:51:23+00:00

One of the men has been charged with having sex with a disabled man, not rape. Because "disabled people shouldn't have sex", amirite?

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-30T21:40:34+00:00

Well, as they say, its not the voltage that kills you but the current, so you make a reasonable point.

But the purpose of the electret is to attract and trap virus-sized particles, not run your laptop. How much potential difference do you think they need?

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-30T13:49:17+00:00

The Ukrainian forces have captured land around Bakhmut and Robotyne.

Let's get some perspective here. Robotyne is heavily contested, Russia holds the high ground to the south and Ukraine the low ground to the north.

The Ukrainian counter-offensive, which was going to break the land corridor and liberate Crimea in a couple of weeks, is now three months old and Ukraine has failed to recapture anything of note. They haven't even reached the first line of the Russian defenses, they're still stuck on the screening line ahead of the main defences.

Ukraine's counter-offensive was their last-ditch attempt to break out of the war of attrition and it has failed. If you read nothing else on this counter-offensive, read Big Serge.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-30T13:03:38+00:00

Why do you think Russia suffered enormous casualties during World War II?

Because the Eastern Front was the largest, most important, and most brutal theatre of the war. Germany threw the majority of their men into the Eastern Front, and were told to offer no mercy to Russians. The invasion of the Soviet Union was literally a war of annihilation, with the aim not just to defeat the USSR and capture territory but to kill or expel every Russian up to the Ural Mountains.

The Western Front (France, Italy, etc) was more or less side-shows to the main event. All the best German troops, with the best equipment, was sent to the Eastern Front. Official Nazi records suggest that nearly 60% of German casualties were on the Eastern Front, but those records are badly incomplete, and the German historian Rüdiger Overmans estimates that overall Germany suffered one million casualties in the West and other fronts and four million on the Eastern Front.

And let's not forget the Romanians, Italians and Finns who also joined Hitler's "Coalition of the Willing"^{sorry, wrong war} against the USSR, as well as Ukrainian insurgents who also fought on Hitler's side.

If you want to know more about the Eastern Front, I recommend you read this analysis by Big Serge.

Everybody keeps going on about "Stalin didn't care about sacrificing his men" but I'll remind you that it wasn't Stalin or the Soviets who forbid his generals from strategic withdrawals. It was Hitler. Time and time again Hitler refused his generals' requests to make a strategic withdrawal, and sacrificed tens of thousands of men in fight-to-the-last-man battles when they could have easily retreated.

But nobody says "Germany doesn't care about the lives of its soldiers".

Penal battalions were especially hard-used by France, through the Imperial and Napoleonic eras. The US used penal battalions during the Civil War. In WW2, the first country to use penal battalions was Germany, early in the war while they were still winning.

But nobody remembers them, they only ever talk about Soviet penal battalions as if they were uniquely Russian.

In WW1, the French and British made vast numbers of charges "over the top" against German machine guns. Uncounted thousands of men died, caught up on barbed wire entanglements. Thousands of British soldiers were executed for "cowardice" for refusing suicidal orders, or for suffering from "shell shock" (PTSD). Entire French regiments mutinied against suicidal orders.

But nobody says "Britain and France doesn't care about the lives of its soldiers".

During the Vietnam war, it is said that the average lifespan of new American lieutenants was just 15 minutes. But nobody says that the US doesn't care about the lives of its soldiers.

The truth is that soldiers from every army are sometimes sacrificed. The Forlorn Hope is as old as warfare itself. Russia is no more inclined to treat its troops as disposable than western nations. The battle of Stalingrad was not typical of Soviet/Russian strategy during WW2, and even if it had been, it was nowhere near as dismissive of casualties as Germany was.

And yet western propaganda still insists on this ludicrous, bloody ridiculous myth that there is something about the Russian national character that they don't care about casualties.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-30T07:32:01+00:00

The microfibres don't hold 13.4 thousand volts. That would kill you if you picked up a mask. I think we would have heard about six billion people being electrocuted by masks, don't you?

The 13 kV is used to induce the surface charge in the plastic fibres, it doesn't mean that they hold enough charge to hold 13 kV potential difference.

I haven't looked it up, but I would guess that they probably hold only a microvolt or less.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-30T07:24:06+00:00

Who knows how many of those 42 people charged are actually guilty? I imagine the Greek cops are under a lot of pressure to find somebody to blame.

If memory serves, there were almost 100 wildfires around Greece, so its plausible that a bit less than half of them were deliberately lit.

In Australia, about half of all bush fires are either deliberate or suspicious. Only 13% of our 62,000 bush fires each year are from natural causes.

(Australia is a lot bigger, drier and hotter than Greece, and our trees are evolved to encourage bush fires. 62000 bush fires in Australia is not unusual. 100 in Greece is probably shockingly high.)

Arson is a lot more common than most people realise.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-30T07:13:25+00:00

Try to apply some common bloody sense.

Before an arsonist can start a wildfire, the conditions have to be right for wildfires to occur. If the conditions aren't right, you can't start a wildfire.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-30T07:09:22+00:00

You don't need to look at complicated science to see that climate is changing.

For hundreds of years, every lethal bush fire in Australia has happened at the height of summer. Now they're starting to occur at the start of spring.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-30T06:57:05+00:00

its not even called Global Warming (GW)

Yes it is.

even the village idiots have seen its not happening

Only the village idiots have seen it not happening, because they won't look.

In my life, winters are milder and arrive later, spring arrives earlier. Thankfully summers in my city don't seem to be heating up (yet) but over much of the rest of the country summers are hotter than ever before.

At the same time, we're getting more weird weather. About 30 years ago, we started getting anomalous cold snaps in late December. We've even had snow in December. Well, we call it snow, not that there's enough to make a snowman, let alone ski, but its still snow. Snow, in Melbourne! In December! That's unheard of.

Or at least, until the 1990s it was unheard of. Now we get cold snaps and frigid, Antarctica air dumping rain, hail and occasionally even snow around Christmas time probably two out of five or six years. That ain't normal. Or rather, it wasn't normal for Melbourne for hundreds of years. But now the climate has changed. There's more heat in the oceans, and the atmosphere, and its changing the flow of water and air.

Climate Change is so vague

If global temperatures rise, the climate changes. Why is this controversial?

"BuT I tHoUGhT evErYThINg WoULd StAy tHE SaME wHEn ThINgS cHAnGE!!1!"

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-30T06:35:14+00:00

Curse those photosynthesising bastards! 😉

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-29T11:11:27+00:00

Beyond, oh, probably Colonel, you don't get promoted by being good at your job, you get promoted for knowing who to brown-nose and what narrative to push.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-29T09:56:23+00:00

Read the fine print.

"Investigators discovered the fentanyl aboard a Danish vessel in a cargo container whose manifest indicated a shipment of calcium chloride. ... When the Mexican Customs laboratory tested a sample of the contents, investigators found the powdered substance tested positive for fentanyl. The customs investigators went on to seize 931 sacks of the same substance, amounting to a weight of 23,368 kilograms (about 25.75 tons). Initial reports on the total weight of seizure are still only an estimate as authorities are still determining the total amount of captured fentanyl powder."

Wanna bet it will turn out to be 25 tons of calcium chloride containing 25 grams of fentanyl? 😄

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-29T09:44:05+00:00

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8fWp-i-BGA&t=91s YouTube and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwkIsnTn01E&t=141s YouTube

So your evidence is a fictional movie made by Hollywood that gives a completely fake and distorted view of the Soviet Union in World War 2, and a propaganda puff-piece from a Ukrainian soldier who may or may not have even been in Bakhmut 😂 😂 😂

(By the way, you know Stalin was Georgian, not Russian, right?)

The video was put on Youtube on May 30, 2023, that's more than five weeks after Bakhmut was secured by Wagner and the Ukrainians defeated, and this junior Lieutenant Olha Bihar was quoted as saying she made small videos that "everything is okay in Bakhmut".

Tens of thousands of Ukrainians died, and even more were permanently injured, in the Bakhmut meat-grinder, the Ukrainian army was severely mauled, and they lost the city, and she thinks that "everything is okay"? I can see why the Ukrainians love her TikTok videos. Its not for her brains.

She ends the video with "So I'm sure that the counteroffensive will be successful." Two months later and we know the counteroffensive was a bloodbath for Ukraine, accomplishing nothing except to prove to the world that Leopards, Bradleys and Strykers burn very nicely when hit by Russian missiles.

Airfields can be defended with air defense systems such as Patriot and NASAMS.

The first time Ukraine turned on one of their Patriots, the Russians smashed it, and they haven't been allowed to turn the rest on since 😂 😂 😂

Patriots are an expensive heap of shit that can't hit anything. Always have been, always will be. Has a Patriot system ever successfully intercepted a hostile missile in actual combat? Probably not.

NASAMS are better but the claims that they have "100% success rate" is just nonsense propaganda. Ukraine consistently exaggerates their ability to hit incoming missiles and drones. If their claims were true, why is Ukraine repeatedly complaining about Russians bombing targets?

Earlier the Ukrainian government was forced to acknowledge that video of a NASAMS shooting down a Su-35 was fake. They also only have two. Sorry, make that one now.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-29T08:50:18+00:00

people who follow your advice

What advice do you think I gave?

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-29T08:41:33+00:00

To make it clear: the arsonist is a proximate cause. The climate conditions caused by global warming are the ultimate cause:

Had the arsonist not lit the fire, but the climate conditions remain the same, the fire could still have occurred for some other reason such as lightning, a car backfiring near dry grass, sunlight shining through a broken piece of glass that happened to form a crude lens, or some other accidental spark.
But had the climate conditions been different (no global warming), the arsonist would not have been able to cause such a devastating wildfire, or even any wildfire at all. The ground would have been too wet, the grass too green, not enough dry tinder, temperatures too low, rain would have put the fires out, etc.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-29T08:34:27+00:00

Four thousand years ago, the Ancient Greeks understood that events can have multiple causes. We still understand that events can have massive chains of dozens of causes. There's even an old proverb about that: for want of a nail.

Meanwhile GW Denialists think that just because an arsonist lit a fire in a forest, the extreme weather conditions and drought and dry tinder that enabled the forest fire to burn so hot and spread so far and so fast no longer exist 🙈 🙉 🙊

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-29T08:29:07+00:00

Only 42 of them were charged with intentional arson, the rest for allowing their fires to spread by neglect.

By the look of it, if five people were at a camp site, and one of them let a fire spread, the authorities have arrested all five.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-29T08:16:50+00:00

Thank you for the link and interesting sources, but there's a lot of confused detail in here.

Electrets are real, and they are used in amplifiers and other electronics, where they can hold their charge for decades or hundreds of years. But the electrets in masks lose their charge much quicker, just from being worn and the moisture in your breath. That's why you're not supposed to wear the disposable masks for more than a day, and why you should never wash them. Even spraying them with alcohol will reduce or destroy the electric charge in the fibres.

The same applies to N95 masks, except the layer of charged fibres is sealed so you can wear it more than once.

(Aside: this is why face masks can do so amazingly well at filtering bacteria in a five minute test under controlled conditions, and so poorly in uncontrolled practice, when the wearer keeps it on for four or five or eight hours. By the end of the day, the mask has no more electric charge and can no longer trap viruses.)

I suppose that, technically, the presence of the static bipole charges in the masks will "ionize the air you breath" in the same way that rubbing your feet on the carpet will generate a static charge that ionizes the air you breathe too. We're talking about absolutely minute levels of ionization that is dwarfed by natural sources of ionization, like the weather. They're neutralised long before they could get inside cells and disrupt the cellular machinery.

The problem here is the masks leak microscopic plastic fibres. Once in the moist lungs, the fibres are going to lose their electric charge instantly, by attracting H⁺ or OH^- ions from the fluid. That's harmless. But the fibres themselves are not really good for you. We don't know exactly why plastic fibres are bad, whether it is their physical size or their chemical composition, or a combination, but these sorts of microplastics are endocrine disruptors and we really should be doing something about the vast amounts of microplastic in our food, the water, the air we breathe, and everywhere in the environment.

N95 masks can both block microfibres from the environment (which is good) but also shed microfibres from the mask into your lungs (which is bad). Its not clear which wins in practice. If a mask blocks two microfibres for every one it leaks, the mask does more good than harm. But if it leaks two microfibres for every one it blocks, it does more harm than good. We don't know which is the case.

Remember the early symptoms that doctors were comparing to altitude sickness and the inability to take in oxygen?

Yes, that was in patients infected with Covid, not people wearing masks.

Covid is not the only disease or condition that can cause this, but it took doctors by surprise because it is somewhat outside of their usual experience unless they're dealing with patients with altitude sickness.

Normally when patients cannot breathe properly and their blood oxygen levels are low, they feel short of breath and become distressed or panicked. But the body doesn't have oxygen sensors! We do have CO2 sensors, and we don't react to the lack of oxygen, but to the build up of CO2 in our blood. That's what triggers the distress and feeling of being short of breath.

Under some circumstances, including some (not all) Covid cases, we can still exhale CO2 fine, and so there is no build-up of CO2 to trigger the feeling of "I can't breath!" but we're not absorbing sufficient oxygen for our needs. This is sometimes called "happy hypoxia" because of the lack of distress. Patients will sit up and chat, and even get up and perform normal activities, while their blood oxygen is too low. There is a very fine line between "low blood oxygen that does no permanent harm" and "sudden catastrophic brain damage from lack of oxygen". Blood oxygen levels are normally around 95%, doctors start to worry when they drop below 90%, and get extremely worried below 80%.

But I digress.

The point is that happy hypoxia in Covid patients, similar to altitude sickness, has nothing to do with the static electric bipole charges in mask microfibres, or the gradient of the earth's electric field. The static charges in mask microfibres are trillions of times weaker than the earth's electric field.

If you had a static charge forming a 200V DC potential difference inside your lungs, believe me, you'd know about it!

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-29T05:17:17+00:00

The F-16 is superior to the SU-35.

That's what the US says about everything American made, no matter how well or badly it actually performs in combat. Its a sales pitch, not a genuine comparison. US military equipment is designed for selling, not for fighting against a peer adversary.

The F-16 isn't junk. It's not a bad plane (unlike the overpriced, under-performing, F-35) and in the hands of capable pilots with many years of experience, would almost be peer to the Su-35. But you're delusional if you think it is superior to the Su-35 in combat. The best you can hope for is that in a close up dog fight it will hold its own against the Su-35. But remember that dog fights are not really a thing any more: in training exercises, dog fights are almost always a mutual kill.

The biggest threats to a fighter are anti-air missiles and EW, and Russia has superiority in both of those. With only a few months of training on the F-16, it's going to be a suicide mission for the Ukrainian pilots, the poor fuckers 😧

I remind you that the SU-35 has already proven itself to out-class the F-16 in Taiwan. Now that wasn't combat, but it still demonstrates that the SU-35 can blind the radar of F-16s, including the much-vaunted AESA, and force them to retreat. The SU-35 is faster, more manoeuvrable, has a longer range and a much higher ceiling, it carries more weapons including potentially hypersonic missiles that the US cannot match, can engage the F-16 from much further away than the F-16 can engage them back, and it has a smaller radar cross-section than the F-16.

Quote: “Su-35 have a radar cross section (RCS) anywhere between one-meter square to three-meter square. Meanwhile, the F-16V has a 5-meter square RCS,”

The retired US officer you quoted knows full well that in combat, the physical size of the planes does not matter very much. Its the radar cross-section that really matters. I won't say physical size makes no difference at all, but having a bigger plane mostly means you have more space to hang more missiles and equipment, and carry more fuel, which means you have a longer combat range. Even with their lighter weight, the F-16 has to turn and run for home while the Su-35 still has plenty of fuel for combat.

An Air Force official said in a Thursday email that pilots without prior flight experience could learn to fly the F-16 in about eight months

Sure. That's like saying that anyone can learn the rules of chess in ten minutes, and thinking that they can then challenge and beat a Grand Master who has had tens of thousands of hours practice. It would be a slaughter.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-28T16:19:55+00:00

The Covid vaccines work to reduce the severity of disease with various degrees of success.

We have literally no good evidence for this. The evidence we have is badly tainted and should be treated as, at best, possible but not proven.

The studies on the Covid vaccines were all performed by the companies with financial interest in them succeeding;
and then approved by regulators who have either been captured by the companies they are supposed to regulate;
or have direct and indirect financial incentives to approve the vaccines;
the Pfizer studies in particular have serious allegations of fraud and scientific misconduct raised against them by whistleblowers and others.

There are all sorts of statistical shenanigans that have been used to shift the numbers to make the vaccines seem more effective. One very common trick is to count any death, regardless of cause, as a Covid death if it occurs within two weeks of a positive Covid test.

In Israel, hospitals would test every patient for Covid if they were unvaccinated but only test the vaccinated if they were showing Covid-like symptoms. That boosts the number of reported "Covid deaths" among the unvaccinated, making the vaccinated cohort look better in comparison.

Another trick is counting deaths in the first two weeks after vaccination as "unvaccinated".

All of these tricks make the vaccines appear better at preventing serious disease than they really are, and over-inflate the number of unvaccinated Covid deaths, making the disease seem more dangerous than it really is.

Another factor, I presume due to panic rather than malice, is that many of the early Covid deaths were due to poor medical treatment contributing to the deaths, if not outright being the cause of the death:

Remdesivir has kidney failure as a known side-effect, was one of the only approved treatments for Covid in the early months. During that time, the media was full of reports of how Covid patients (being treated with Remdesivir) were dying of kidney failure, and the blame put on the virus.
Lung damage and other complications from early intubation (ventilators), including secondary bacterial pneumonia which (in contrast to the previous SARS outbreak) was often not treated with antibiotics.
Early in the pandemic, when patients where being routinely intubated, there were many cases of multi-organ failure due to a cytokine storm. Now that patients are only rarely intubated, and then much less aggressively, deaths from cytokine storm has all but disappeared. Guess which treatment can cause a deadly cytokine storm?

This made the early Covid strains seem much more deadly than they really were, and by extension made the vaccines seem better at reducing severe illness.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-28T15:56:36+00:00

If the new weapons aren't making a difference, why is Russia on the defense?

The war has been going on for about 18 months now. Have you not worked out Russia's strategy yet?

All through the war, Russia has been willing to trade ground for troops' lives.

Once the Russian feint against Kiev succeeded in drawing Ukrainian troops away from the south, Russia just abandoned Kiev.
When Russia was over-extended in Kherson, they just withdrew behind prepared defences, so surprising Ukraine that they thought it was a trap.
Similarly in Kharkiv, where the Russians just walked away. The Ukrainians went against a light screening force of national guardsmen and LNR militia, re-gained some land, but failed to inflict heavy losses on either Russian men or matériel.

The only significant territory Ukraine has re-taken has been territory Russia walked away from. When Russia digs in and fights, Ukrainian forces get brutally slaughtered with a causality ratio of 7:1 or 10:1. Ukraine in on something like their 5th mobilisation, and has been literally kidnapping men off the street to conscript them. Meanwhile Russia is still using their first mobilisation, and has no conscripts in Ukraine. They're all volunteer professional soldiers.

The Ukrainians have shown themselves to be brave and tough fighters, but they are led by incompetents, and their strategy is driven by the US which sees Ukrainians as expendable and Zelensky who is willing to send wave after wave of untrained troops to die trying to hold every square inch. NATO training is good only for killing sheep herders and untrained insurgents, and Ukraine is vastly outgunned, outmissiled and outdroned, and has no answer to Russia's EW capabilities. At one point during the slaughter in Bakhmod, Ukrainian survivors reported they had as few as five mortar shells per day while Russia was able to keep up an almost continuous barrage of artillery fire.

Russia's strategy is to let the meat-grinder chew up the Ukrainian army until it collapses. Putin doesn't give a shit that Ukraine is winning the PR war for Likes and Reddit upvotes. Russia controls close to 20% of Ukraine, and if Ukraine wants to keep throwing bodies into the meat-grinder, that's perfectly acceptable to Russia. "Never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake."

If all runways in Ukraine have been cratered, how does Ukraine's air force operate? The Storm Shadow is fired from aircraft.

Ukraine's air force doesn't operate in any meaningful sense. They might be able to repair a runway enough to send up a plane or two, but they cannot put significant numbers of planes in their air. They don't have the planes any more, which is why they're asking for F-16s.

As for Storm Shadows, that's another wonder weapon that was meant to be a "Game Changer" but has failed to do much. Probably because Ukraine can't get the planes in the air to launch them, and when they do, Russia has proven they can shoot them down and has even captured at least one intact Storm Shadow.

This is why the US and NATO are so reluctant to send their "good stuff" to Ukraine. They know they'll be destroyed and captured and the illusion of American technological invisibility will be shattered. I mean, imagine paying good money for a Patriot system 😂 😂 😂

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-28T15:09:28+00:00

That is possibly the greatest thing I have ever seen.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-28T11:05:45+00:00

ChatGTP sucks and people who use it are going to destroy the quality of information and discussion.

Paranoid conspiracy theories are not intentionally unbelievable.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-28T11:02:41+00:00

If you don't vote for the lesser evil, what do you do?

Vote for the greater evil.
Throw your vote away (or don't vote, which is the same thing).
Destroy the system (which is in itself the greatest evil).

Inquiring minds want to know.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-27T11:56:36+00:00

I suspect this "blue house" thing is a disinformation larp to discredit the movement for an investigation.

This. I hate to admit it Tom, but you got it in one.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-27T11:18:17+00:00

Yes, we are in fact following that same process right now.

What coup are you talking about? The one where a bunch of unarmed protesters (from the most heavily armed demographic in the USA, and they left their guns at home) and FBI informants were allowed to wander around the Capital Building and were literally shown around by the Capital Police? The one where the supposed ring leaders repeatedly told people to keep the protests peaceful and go home? The one where the authorities refused to send reinforcements although they knew a protest was planned?

There were genuine attempted insurrections a few months earlier, when armed Antifa declared independent Autonomous Zones in Seattle and Portland. Other Antifa firebombed the Capital Building with improvised mortars and incendiary devices, while Trump was in the building. 14 Secret Service agents were injured, and the Secret Service evacuated Trump into a hardened bunker during the attack. Didn't the press have a field day mocking him for that.

Or maybe you're talking about the time four years earlier, when violent protesters attempted to prevent the inauguration and start a resistance movement against the Trump regime?

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-27T10:49:19+00:00

If Putin wanted Prigozhin dealt with, an arrest and trial for treason would have sent a public message. Or a fall out of a fifth floor window if he wanted a private message.

But wiping out the entire command of Wagner? Unless there are things going on we don't know about, that doesn't sound like its to Russia's advantage, or Putin personally.

Having it happen on the same day that Russia and BRICS has just sent a big F U to the west is embarrassing. I'm not saying that BRICS is going to fall apart, but it can't help but make the BRICS countries wonder if they chose the right side. A guy who commits such clumsy, obvious murder, killing ten people to get one? Its not the killing so much as the way it is so obvious it was Putin. (Maybe even too obvious.)

Worse, it takes attention away from the BRICS conference, and so a massive PR win for Russia is neutered.

If the next level of Wagner execs step up to the plate and keep the African operations going, then in the long run it won't make much difference to Russia. But if Wagner falls apart and that allows France and the US to regain control over the African nations, well, the assassination either spectacularly backfired on Putin, or it was a win for the real assassins (France? Ukraine? The USA?)

All we can say is that of all the ways Putin might have handled Prigozhin -- forgiveness, trial or assassination -- the way it actually was handled hurts Putin and Russia far more than it helps them.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-27T09:01:36+00:00

Doesn't need a lab to make new variants. Its a coronavirus, that's what they do: they evolve into new variants all the time. Especially when you have hundreds of millions or billions of people given "leaky" vaccines that don't provide full immunity right in the middle of a raging pandemic.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-27T08:58:47+00:00

So the vaccines and boosters don't give immunity to this variant, or prevent illness, or prevent transmission. Sounds exactly the same as the other variants.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-27T07:43:31+00:00

Congrats, you beat up a guy who had a mild crush on you.

Either that or he thought of you as "one of the guys" until you beat him up. And now he probably gets scared-horny every time he remembers you 😁

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-27T07:12:24+00:00

I get that reference 😃

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-27T06:44:18+00:00

That used to work. But now the Democrats are all:

Doesn't matter, because The Bad Guys will never will get into government again. Only The Good Guys (us), we're going to be in charge forever because we're just that awesome and popular.^{also because of all the media manipulation}

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-27T06:27:09+00:00

Thanks.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-27T06:19:24+00:00

the bank robbery absolutely happened because we all heard the recording. Literally everyone in America, who was at all interested in politics, heard the phone call.

What recording are you referring to? The [32 second extract(https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-55524676) of a phone call that lasted over an hour?

I'm pretty sure not "literally everyone" has listed to the full hour. Because if they had, it is clear and obvious that Trump is not asking the Georgian Secretary of State to join in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the voters.

No fair-minded person can listen to the entire recording and decide that it is a conspiracy to commit fraud. Trump really, desperately, believed that he won and the election was stolen and Biden is not the legitimate winner. You don't have to think he is right to see that. Call it wishful thinking, call it idiocy, maybe even call it the truth, but whatever you call it, he thought the Georgia results were election fraud and it was the responsibility of the Georgian officials to investigate and not just sweep it under the carpet.

You have to be a mad Conspiracy Theory nutcase to listen to the entire hour long phone call and conclude that Trump is asking for Georgia to fraudulently invent 11 thousand non-existent votes. The worst you can say is that Trump is delusional and desperate and cannot believe that the Georgian voters voted against him. So now the state of Georgia has just criminalised being wrong.

And to justify that dangerous, dictatorial overreach, they have to invent this mad conspiracy theory that says that Trump wasn't desperately asking for Brad Raffensperger to investigate election fraud and find 11K legitimate votes that weren't counted (or 11K fake votes which were counted) but was engaged in a conspiracy to fraudulently fix the election by inventing votes.

Do you really want the government to make it a crime to dispute the results of an election?

If you criminalise being wrong and "spreading false information" (conveniently for the government, they get to decide what information is false), what happens if Trump is found not guilty by a jury?

Every single journalist and politician who has spent the last three years repeating the claims that Trump tried to steal the election will themselves be guilty of the "crime" of spreading false information.

This is a gun the Democrats and Never Trump Republicans better know how to shoot accurately, because if they miss Trump and he wins the election in 2024, they can be charged with the exact crime they have invented to get him. Oh the irony if that happens.

Its also a gun that is amazingly dangerous for democracy. State a wrong opinion? Talk about an inconvenient truth the government labels "false information"? Off to jail you go.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-27T03:57:37+00:00

Alas, katanas are not legal here. I have to train with a two-by-four.

weavilsatemyface · 2023-08-27T03:52:51+00:00

They're delusional if they think they can get air superiority. This is just another in the long line of NATO "game changers" that failed to make any difference at all, starting with Stingers, HIMARS, Leopards, Bradleys, Patriots, Storm Shadows, and more. Most have been duds. A few have been moderately effective but none are capable of shifting the balance of power in this war.

The problem is that NATO is simply incapable of fighting a high-intensity war against a peer adversary. If you need a goat herder vaporised, NATO can do that no problem. If you want to bomb the shit out of an enemy armed with 1970s vintage weapons, NATO's your guy. If you want to fight a high-tech military with an overwhelming superiority in matériel and electronic warfare capabilities you can't match, well, you don't want to do that. And NATO certainly can't without resorting to nuclear weapons.

Pilots in the west train for years on F-16s, and they think Ukrainian pilots can become expert in a few weeks or months? Tell 'em they're dreamin'.

The F-16 is widely outclassed by the Su-35 even in the best conditions. Unfortunately for Ukraine, the F-16s won't be fighting under the best conditions.

The F-16s can't take off or land from within Ukraine. All the runways suitable for F-16s have been cratered, and the Russians can destroy them faster than Ukraine can fix them. So they'll have to take off from hundreds of miles behind NATO lines, which means not only will they have used a significant amount of fuel, but Russia will have plenty of notice that they're coming.

There is one reason only why the US has approved the supply of F-16s to Ukraine: so the countries selling the F-16s to Ukraine (what, you think they give 'em away for free?) will have to replace them with the expensive piece of junk, the F-35.

weavilsatemyface