So it seems we’re somewhere around stage 6 at the moment. I would be very surprised if they actively start exterminating people. What they’ll do instead is make life so absolutely intolerable for the disobedient that their only choice is to comply, or starve to death. There have already been a few show trials and imprisonments; property confiscation will probably happen simply by cutting off people’s sources of income so that mortgages can be foreclosed.
Where there’s a will there’s a way.
A study by University of Wisconsin-Madison psychologists found kids could identify the right emotion on uncovered faces about 66% of the time.
With a mask in the way, the kids correctly identified sadness about 28% of the time, anger 27% of the time and fear 18% of the time.
Other studies have shown further deficits in a young child’s emotional reasoning abilities whilst struggling to infer emotional content from facial configurations, due to people wearing masks.
They concluded: “…(masks) alter or delay the development of social skills associated with face perception in early childhood.”
PCR testing for the newborns.
Sequence from the trusted CCP.
3 hours later…
Hmm. I’m an engineer, not a molecular biologist, but we call that sort of thing a kludge.
a.k.a. “it kinda works, but it probably still has some bugs in it”.
Any idea if the full interview is available?
When you say, essentially, democracy is dead, dictatorship is here, “all your base are belong to us”… you are attacking the thing that most people in (1st world) democratic societies call democracy. It’s like if you think all the doctors in a hospital are lousy and therefore announce there are no doctors in this hospital, only actors in doctor suits! then yes, you’re attacking the doctors. Maybe they really are lousy, but if they’re doctors they’re doctors. Ditto if you say there are no teachers in a school, no apples in an apple pie, no son/daughter among your children, no fish in the ocean…
Well that’s a relief.
I ask again: why are you so in love with absolutism?
Perhaps more importantly, why are you so in love with defeatism?
Ah, if only people were willing to cooperate enough to build a system where people step forward and say “I’m for this idea” and “I’m for that idea” and then the people write X’s on pieces of paper with those other people’s names on them and then whoever gets the most X’s becomes a delegate to a big meeting where ideas get debated and decisions get made…
What’s the word for that again? 
I have in my hand, a piece of paper …
Try harder, mate. 
I mean come on, you can do better! 
Well, look. According to you, everything is absolutely fine and there’s nothing to worry about. Fair enough. You can sit there and wait for people with pieces of paper to sort it all out. I’m not defeated: I’m wondering what the hell we, the plebs, are supposed to do about all this, because I really don’t think delegating grey men in grey suits to have big meetings is going to do the trick.
I’m just astounded that you can look around you and think “looks like democracy is working well today”.
(Sorry, I can’t find a photo of BoJo with a “WRONG” caption on short notice.)
What horrible vaccine did a mad scientist give you that took away your perception of nuance?
Working well? Who said it even had to work well? The bottom line is, is it still better ( = less bad) than the alternatives? I vote yes.
OK, you seem to be (partially) agreeing that this is a SNAFU, but since there is no alternative, we just have to roll with it?
I’m suggesting that what we have now is not democracy - because if it was, it would probably deliver better results than what we’re seeing. In other words, you seem to have rather low expectations for the performance of the least-bad political solution ever devised.
The thing is, in my line of work, if something sort-of works, we tend to tinker with it until it gets better. We don’t usually just shrug and say “cha bu duo la”.
Of course it is. Every day is a SNAFU. That’s what the N stands for, after all.
, but since there is no alternative, we just have to roll with it?
I already gave you some advice the other day, didn’t I?
I never said there is no alternative to any given jurisdiction’s handling of Covid. Of course there is – look at any other jurisdiction that didn’t copy what the first one did. You even pointed out a better known example of this in the OP. 
I’m suggesting that what we have now is not democracy - because if it was, it would probably deliver better results than what we’re seeing. In other words, you seem to have rather low expectations for the performance of the least-bad political solution ever devised.
If the doctor doesn’t restore you to optimal health, he’s not a real doctor? That’s not how definitions work. 
What is democracy only sort-of works, it needs tinkering, so I’m definitely never ever going to vote if not a gigantic shrug?
No idea. If I come across it, I will post it.
Meanwhile down under it seems the masks are for show (like elsewhere in political elite circles as shown in videos I have posted over the last 15 months)
In Israel:
Sweden looks nice this time of the year:
But this goes way beyond “any given jurisdiction”. I think this is why a lot of people just shut down, hunker down, and hope it all goes away. It’s less stressful to think “this too will pass” or “I’m sure they know what they’re doing” than to consider the possibility that this could all go really pearshaped, really fast.
I think I’ve made my opinion of doctors and medicine quite clear in other posts. Some aspects of medicine are close to miraculous. Others, not so. Particularly when financial interests start to come into play. Whether he’s a “real doctor” sometimes only has a tangential relevance to whether he can make you better.
As I said, I look at this as an engineer. If your solution isn’t working well, then you’re supposed to stop with that solution and try something different. You don’t necessarily need to pull it all to pieces and start again (although very occasionally that is necessary). Usually you’ve got it half-right and there’s just some stupid mistake gumming up the works. What you don’t do is try to hold the crappy bits together with duct tape.
So, there’s a perfect recipe for democracy somewhere? Okay then, go ahead and publish your cookbook. We’re all waiting. 
I won’t even bring up your previous comments on What The World Needs (though they’re there for anyone who cares to use the search function). For argument’s sake, you have a clean slate! 
No no no no.
Democracy is not a thing, born fully formed and monolithic. It’s a process. People try to pull it to pieces, and other people try to build it back. You’ve always got a team of vandals (the politicians, usually) pulling bricks out of the castle walls, and a team of responsible adults (hopefully) putting them back in again. Not necessarily in the same places. It’s complicated. It evolves to fit a specific cultural context.You can’t just lay down a blueprint for democracy and say, there, that’s how it works: now go away and do it. People have tried that and failed.
Any big human project evolves. It’s never right first time. You fix this, and then that, and if you keep doing it right you end up with something a lot better after a while, although it’s a case of diminishing returns. At some point you do think, OK, that’s good enough. But sometimes somebody takes a big spanner to the works, and then things get a bit more complicated than just stepwise evolution.
I honestly don’t know how we fix what’s broken here (and I don’t think anyone else does either) because it’s quite hard to even pinpoint what’s broken. Whatever game They are playing, they’re keeping their cards very close to their chests. But we need to find out. And then 7 billion people need to make enough fuss that it gets fixed.
Then why talk about it in engineerspeak?
Hmmm. I guess I failed to explain how engineering works.
Or you failed to subject yourself to your own standards.
Just getting this back on topic: there’s a lot of chatter about the latest evil inflicted by vaccine-deniers, which is that they are petri dishes for the evolution of variants.
It’s a nice neat story that the public are lapping up. Except that it’s probably not true. There are several mechanisms that can exert selection pressure on the virus, and there’s a good discussion of the subject here:
This video features Geert van den Bossche, who is basically Voldemort to the COVID Harry Potters. He-who-must-not-be-named is full of dangerous ideas, eg., that the vaccinated may be acting as “puzzle rooms” for the virus to practice escape strategies. He’s been subjected to a concerted smear campaign, but even if he’s nuts (or just wrong) you can’t really dispute his qualifications and experience, so I’d say he’s worth a listen. The process he describes appears to be very similar to that which occurs in “gain of function” experiments.
As the presenter says: we don’t know for sure if this is a big issue. Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. But the thing is this: if the bigwigs know there’s something in it, then it would be a plausible explanation for the political panic over the failure to reach 100% vaccination. We were always told that if we got to 70%ish, then we’d achieve that magical herd immunity. But it didn’t happen (and in retrospect there was really no reason to believe that it would, since vaccines don’t create sterilizing immunity). Instead, we were catapulted into a brand-new level of hysteria. Why was that?
If van den Bossche is correct, then there are only two possible courses of action: stop vaccinating and let the chips fall where they may, or get every single person vaccinated, and keep doing it forever.
