Posts by Anony Mous

18

Keystone XL Pipeline & Watchtower Research

by IWant2Leave in

you may know that president joe biden canceled the permits for the xl canadian pipeline on his first day in office.

this was a controversial move, and there has been discussion and videos floating around the office where i work.

one of my co-workers showed a video of all the jobs being lost.

Anony Mous

@Frozen it's the looped thinking of the ecological movement. According to them we should all be living off the land in grass huts cutting our own trees and finding berries (not meat) to eat.

They don't understand economics which demonstrate that if we had the number of people currently alive cutting trees for fuel, we'd have no forests left anywhere on earth and that we'd need 3 more planets just to grow more food. Every economic shortcut gives a much greater amplifying effect. It's very easy to say "well, about 80% of the Internet is not directly contributing any value related to economy" (and it is true YouTube videos are not directly economically productive) or nobody needs 3 computers, 2 tablets and 5 TV's at home or having more than one car per family is wasteful, but it's the consumer economy that has driven the cost and efficiency of computers and TV's down to the point where they are cheap enough for not just the largest corporations to afford them and become economic drivers.

And people in the 1950's understood this. So a lot of us older folks coming down from the Boomer generation should understand this as well. The government needed integrated circuits to go to space, so they asked private corporations to build it for them, which then turned around and marketed and sold the remainder of the production runs to researchers and hobbyists which some of them turned this computer thing into a small business (eg. Intel) which after selling a few units someone thought it would be great if we packaged these up for business (IBM) and then how about we can get this stuff at home to play games and do homework (Atari, Dell, ...)

Same goes for this pipeline, it drives an economic output of 1M jobs downstream, it is not directly employing 1M people, but it is generating an income equal to 1M people working by employing the jobs for a value of maybe 10% of 10M people or 1% of 100M people. The dozens of people that work at the pipeline, feed the needs of the refinery that employ hundreds of people that employ thousands of people in the gas stations it fills that fuel the millions of people in the area that need to go back and forth to work every day. The media and these Greenpeace hippies use false dichotomy and bend the narratives because explaining economics is really hard and the average person has no desire studying for a degree in economics just to understand their vote on a pipeline.

It's the same arguments the JW's use to justify their pictures of paradise, not understanding that you're interrupting entire economic and ecological and biological structures by turning carnivores into herbivores just to satisfy a single verse in a poem from the Bible.

A "planned economy" (1 car per family, defined number of electronics, equality through laws and procedure) was the prevailing theory of the Soviet Union, Pol Pot, North Korea and many other communist systems and they fail invariably because nobody is driving the economy with better and bigger projects.

18

Keystone XL Pipeline & Watchtower Research

by IWant2Leave in

you may know that president joe biden canceled the permits for the xl canadian pipeline on his first day in office.

this was a controversial move, and there has been discussion and videos floating around the office where i work.

one of my co-workers showed a video of all the jobs being lost.

Anony Mous

Here is a completely non-partisan, logical consideration of your point

1) There is already a pipeline that runs from Canada to Port Arthur, Tx. - correct, but your own point 4 undercuts the notion that it is sufficient - running oil through train cars is significantly more pollution (you have to run the train after all) and the accelerant to the Keystone XL pipeline was that a train derailed and spilled all over a nature reservation. It was then found out that more pipeline would have avoided all that.

2) Farmers, ranchers, American Indians, all that would stand to make profit from the pipeline, most, do not support it. Environmentalists are against it. Underground water supply could be polluted. As much as we like and need oil, we can't drink it.

Farmers are always against taking their land under executive order as the land grab never ends. I concur with their issues but there is a balance to be struck somewhere. The history of the "American Indian representatives" is full of anti-government sentiment stoked by white people more interested in protecting the idea of 'the noble savage' which left their populations in the state they currently are in.

As far as the groundwater pollution, that is assuming the pipe leaks non-stop without anyone fixing it. Pipelines don't just leach things into the ground, everything going in the ground is waste and a potential for expensive cleanups. Hence what I said prior, engineers have figured out ways to build pipelines without leaks and plenty of backups.

3) Only 48% of Canadians support this 2nd pipeline(XL). This could mean that 52% are against or don't have an opinion on it.

Or it means the media has painted a bad picture of the thing. You could cut the same to say only 30% of Americans support Biden because the rest either voted Trump or didn't vote. It's a bad argument if you don't present all the pros-and-cons honestly.

4) Canada is on track to set record oil exports to the U.S via railcar and the existing Keystone pipeline that has been operational for years now.

See point 1 - there are seriously more issues with railcars than pipelines

5) Many of the jobs related to the construction of the pipeline are temporary.

That is a bit of a tautology, because the pipeline won't be endlessly constructed. So yes, those jobs are temporary, but there will be more jobs at the refineries and transportation of finished products, the trucks and boats and trains that it fuels that drive the economy etc.

6) The oil that would run through XL pipeline is a thicker corrosive crude that is extracted from the Canadian and Nebraska sands, that creates more pollution than normal oil operations.

According to whom? And yes, pollution happens when we extract and burn oil. Low-pressure collection of shale and fracked gas/oil is cheaper and thus less polluting than drilling high-pressure holes far off-shore and deep into the ocean floor (remember the BP leak a few years ago that took months to close and Exxon-Valdez for the transport of said oil). But the only true zero-emission (nuclear) has been paused indefinitely by the same environmentalist and wind/solar is both too unreliable and too expensive and very, very polluting (heavy metals, lead, rare earths - look at factories and mining in China that produce solar panels and large motors - they are slowly poisoning entire cities with all their major cities now covered in a fine yellow haze from the byproducts of heavy metals like lithium, which is worse than the smog we had in the 80s and 90s in the West). There is a balance between dumping the oil in the nature parks and using 100% of it without emission. A pipeline is the cleanest, least amount of energy required to transport oil, regular transport has major issues and is a lot more expensive, which is why they want a pipeline in the first place, to make cheaper and more profitable oil.

18

Keystone XL Pipeline & Watchtower Research

by IWant2Leave in

you may know that president joe biden canceled the permits for the xl canadian pipeline on his first day in office.

this was a controversial move, and there has been discussion and videos floating around the office where i work.

one of my co-workers showed a video of all the jobs being lost.

Anony Mous

How was the research eye-opening? There are many partisan think thanks that give their opinion. This pipeline would've added 1M jobs to the US economy, obviously not directly employed (which is the media skimming over a LOT of details and economics) by the company but it is an effect it has.

Even today, there are 11,000 people working on the project and this project has been going on for years now and will for many more. That isn't a drop in the bucket.

Do research, but also understand what the research means and all its biases. Obviously everything has a side effect, both positive and negative, but these engineers involved have built pipelines across the world without major environmental disasters and this particular line is so over-engineered it's unlikely to fail even if it was totally neglected for a decade.

Even if you ignore everything, just think logically. This guy has been President for what, 24h and he suddenly has all the information to make a balanced decision? Even just the legal implications (Presidents, unlike what the media tells you don't have unlimited power) would've taken weeks if not months to research, the President does not have unilateral power to just cancel a permit that has been provided.

44

Covid lung damage worse than from heavy smoking

by FatFreek 2005 in

we've probably all heard it, "i wish i could get the covid and that way it would be behind me", as if it were some annoying rite of passage.

"sure, i'll lose my senses of smell and taste for awhile, i'll lose my strength for awhile", etc.. what else could be the reasoning for ignoring the social distancing to attend maskless parties and similar large group gatherings?.

however, looking at the following xray images of certain lungs may help impress some folks into thinking that there are more serious happenings in the attack progression of this virus.

Anony Mous

@sherman: I don’t think the virus was created in a lab, we’ve seen these viruses coming from China for well over 100 years. Notoriously the Spanish Flu, originated from China, left 10M people dead.

I do think this virus is being used by various people in power to push through their agenda, business and politics. This goes from Bill Gates to the local mayor.

We had similar numbers in deaths in the past, notoriously Obama’s H1N1 outbreak took 2 years and left 12,000 people dead in the US alone, most died before the government even started implementing any measures, they responded 14 months after the first case, but we never locked down, never developed a vaccine. According to the NYT and WSJ, if H1N1 was as deadly as COVID and handled according to the Obama playbook they left behind, we’d have 2M people dead.

44

Covid lung damage worse than from heavy smoking

by FatFreek 2005 in

we've probably all heard it, "i wish i could get the covid and that way it would be behind me", as if it were some annoying rite of passage.

"sure, i'll lose my senses of smell and taste for awhile, i'll lose my strength for awhile", etc.. what else could be the reasoning for ignoring the social distancing to attend maskless parties and similar large group gatherings?.

however, looking at the following xray images of certain lungs may help impress some folks into thinking that there are more serious happenings in the attack progression of this virus.

Anony Mous

1.2B grant vs a 100M loan, that is an order of magnitude difference. Also note that those are not the only vaccines, some vaccine developments failed, which were also funded. The US has funded through Operation Warpspeed close to $10B in COVID vaccine research in the first bill passed in Congress earlier 2020, not counting the recent budget they passed with billions more, not counting how much NSF and NIH allocated from existing budgets, while also historically (since WW2) funding about 80% of the entire world’s healthcare research, far away from the UK in second place and in recent years China. The CDC just budgeted $8B for vaccine distribution alone.

In comparison world leaders, including the EU, pledged only $8B for both the R&D and the distribution of vaccines when the US went at it alone in May 2020.

Either way, to make my point a bit easier to understand why testing has failed: here is a video that explains, watch before the woke scolds take it down. https://youtu.be/IZ_8b_Ydsv0

44

Covid lung damage worse than from heavy smoking

by FatFreek 2005 in

we've probably all heard it, "i wish i could get the covid and that way it would be behind me", as if it were some annoying rite of passage.

"sure, i'll lose my senses of smell and taste for awhile, i'll lose my strength for awhile", etc.. what else could be the reasoning for ignoring the social distancing to attend maskless parties and similar large group gatherings?.

however, looking at the following xray images of certain lungs may help impress some folks into thinking that there are more serious happenings in the attack progression of this virus.

Anony Mous

@naja: can’t read what’s behind the paywall but I would suggest you look at the statistics. Look up Sweden COVID death rate.

Sweden had virtually zero deaths until early November. It started out at about 100 per day in the worst and then it tapered down.

They had lots of infections,their case rate statistics are almost the inverse of their death rates (as I said, they locked down their old age homes while letting young people work and be free). Then November 3rd they started implementing lockdowns similar to other countries because case rates had been “skyrocketing” for nearly 2 months and they implemented restrictions on bars and restaurants. Suddenly their deaths rose to 300 and now 400 per day.

Now everyone is saying that Sweden was right to begin with.

The Uk went through the same thing. Remember when Boris Johnson was going to kill everyone by not locking down enough last summer. During that time death rates plummeted from their initial surge. When they tightened the lockdown rules in early September to only groups of 6, there was a surge in deaths once again.

You may wonder why this is and it’s fairly simple. Let’s say you want to go to the pub or the movies, where are you not: with elderly family, indoors in tight spaces. Let’s say the government tells you you can’t go to the pub or the movies, where are you: visiting your elderly family, staying indoors, more often with family and friends.

The same happened in California. People were enjoying the summer, suddenly in the middle of a heat wave: no more outdoor dining, no more trips to the beach. Where did everyone go? They went indoors with recirculated air. What happened: deaths skyrocketed.

Again, not talking about cases. Talk about deaths. Nobody cares if you’re sick, people care if you’re dead.

44

Covid lung damage worse than from heavy smoking

by FatFreek 2005 in

we've probably all heard it, "i wish i could get the covid and that way it would be behind me", as if it were some annoying rite of passage.

"sure, i'll lose my senses of smell and taste for awhile, i'll lose my strength for awhile", etc.. what else could be the reasoning for ignoring the social distancing to attend maskless parties and similar large group gatherings?.

however, looking at the following xray images of certain lungs may help impress some folks into thinking that there are more serious happenings in the attack progression of this virus.

Anony Mous

@Sherman: not really, you get the vaccine so you don’t get sick. You can still carry the disease and make others sick although you won’t be a host. If you touch a surface that has the virus, you can keep it alive and transfer it, likewise as it floats in the air, you can sniff it up and sneeze it back out.

Although the chances are greatly reduced, since you won’t get sick and continuously shed the virus for 2 weeks. So eventually the hope is that sufficient people don’t keep shedding and the virus dies down.

Alternatively everyone gets sick and the virus burns itself out. This is kind of what happened in NY and NJ, they put everyone that was sick in old people homes, let thousands of people die in the first few weeks and then claimed victory when nobody else was around to die in great numbers. Sweden did a similar thing but protected the elderly. They basically told the elderly to stay home and shelter, let it burn through the young population with minimum casualties and then nobody passed it to the elderly later which minimized overall death.

There will be residual pockets of outbreaks and death, which we see in polio and HIV for example, even though vaccines are available, not everyone can get them or wants them, but the vaccine should curtail those cases to manageable levels. Countries in Africa and China will continue to be hotbeds for a while though.

44

Covid lung damage worse than from heavy smoking

by FatFreek 2005 in

we've probably all heard it, "i wish i could get the covid and that way it would be behind me", as if it were some annoying rite of passage.

"sure, i'll lose my senses of smell and taste for awhile, i'll lose my strength for awhile", etc.. what else could be the reasoning for ignoring the social distancing to attend maskless parties and similar large group gatherings?.

however, looking at the following xray images of certain lungs may help impress some folks into thinking that there are more serious happenings in the attack progression of this virus.

Anony Mous

@Sherman: You are misinterpreting the science. Yes, you can TEST POSITIVE for COVID multiple times. I have a family member who tested positive and negative on and off daily for 6 weeks straight (worked in a nursing home).

However unless biology is completely wrong, you cannot get infected with SARS-CoV-2 and develop COVID-19 after you've already obtained SARS-CoV-2 and went through the entire COVID-19 lifecycle.

The case studies and news articles you point to are about people testing positive multiple times, or getting sick, getting better and relapsing, or people that tested negative while being on treatment and then test positive again. That isn't completely unsurprising given the replication levels during testing give you orders of magnitude higher chance at false positive than they should be. There are also a margin where you can test and get false negatives. In most cases these relapses were in EU, Brazil, Mexico where many testing is done using Chinese-sourced test kits which have ~20% failure rate.

Now the question is whether you have been sick and tested positive, should you get vaccinated:

- I believe yes, as I said, the tests give orders of magnitude too many false positives. It is entirely possible you got a flu or a common cold, tested positive for COVID because you were too close to someone with actual COVID and some remnants of dead virus were in your nasal tract.

- If you have been part of a research study or you got a private COVID testing done, and your COVID-testing was done with blood samples, and that proved positive, then NO, it isn't necessary to get vaccinated. You have immunity, that's what the blood test tests for, whether you have T-cells that attack COVID-19 samples, and if you have immunity, that means you were infected at one point.

This also means, if you have your blood tested after the vaccine, you will test 'positive' for COVID-19 blood testing.

Note: I have been involved in HIV and other immunology research. Again, it is possible, but extremely unlikely that we are collectively wrong about viruses or about COVID-19 in particular. If COVID-19 was a 'designer virus' or mutates extremely quickly it could indeed be possible to get multiple infections, to date, there is no evidence of that, if we had evidence of that, we'd have no vaccine.

44

Covid lung damage worse than from heavy smoking

by FatFreek 2005 in

we've probably all heard it, "i wish i could get the covid and that way it would be behind me", as if it were some annoying rite of passage.

"sure, i'll lose my senses of smell and taste for awhile, i'll lose my strength for awhile", etc.. what else could be the reasoning for ignoring the social distancing to attend maskless parties and similar large group gatherings?.

however, looking at the following xray images of certain lungs may help impress some folks into thinking that there are more serious happenings in the attack progression of this virus.

Anony Mous

There is no proof of anyone being reinfected at this point. There are less than a half dozen cases across the world which is statistical noise.

All we have is proof that people can test positive multiple times, we also have proof the current testing regiment triggers on anything remotely related to COVID, including other coronaviruses and dead remnant particles of the virus.

Viruses don't work that way, unless they mutate, you won't get re-infected unless we have the whole field of biology very, very wrong for nearly 2 centuries. COVID seems to be able to mutate very slowly, the recombinant vaccine seems to be able to capture the extant mutations.

What is possible is that someone (China) creates another form of the virus using genetic manipulation. They sent COVID in ice cream the other day while claiming their entire country has zero infections. Either they're lying about the number of infected, or they're intentionally sending COVID.

The vaccine will help, that's what vaccinations are designed to do. So will getting sick, that's what it's designed to do. Look at any other viral disease - Polio, Chicken Pox. The only way to get sick multiple times is to contract different versions of the disease. So in some cases, it may still be necessary to get polio vaccines if you already contracted polio, because there are 3 polio variants in the world and you should get vaccinated against the other 2.

COVID-19 (aka the Trump virus) is by definition 1 variant of the coronavirus, you will still get sick with the common cold which is also a coronavirus, but until there is a COVID-21 (by prior definition will be called the Biden virus), this COVID-19 vaccine (by prior definition the Trump vaccine) created by Operation Warpspeed and funded globally by the US will protect you against all currently extant variations of COVID-19.

This last notion is important to understand if you don't live in the US. ONLY the vaccines created by the Trump admin have thus far worked. China's Sinovac has a 50% efficacy (basically a coin toss whether you get immunity) and Russia's vaccine has major side effects and was cancelled. I know in the EU, Brazil and some other socialist countries you can get Sinovac or will get Sinovac, those don't work or at least not very well. Hop on a plane to Florida like every other rich person in the world to get in line for a proper distribution system. Don't go to NY where we've so far destroyed 70% of our supply because it went out of date, because NYS wants to prioritize people based on race and hasn't even started distribution to the general population yet.

9

Oh What Is That Sound?

by Simon in

jw
friends

o what is that sound which so thrills the eardown in the valley drumming, drumming?only the scarlet soldiers, dear,the soldiers coming.o what is that light i see flashing so clearover the distance brightly, brightly?only the sun on their weapons, dear,as they step lightly.o what are they doing with all that gear,what are they doing this morning, morning?only their usual manoeuvres, dear,or perhaps a warning.o why have they left the road down there,why are they suddenly wheeling, wheeling?perhaps a change in their orders, dear,why are you kneeling?o haven't they stopped for the doctor's care,haven't they reined their horses, horses?why, they are none of them wounded, dear,none of these forces.o is it the parson they want, with white hair,is it the parson, is it, is it?no, they are passing his gateway, dear,without a visit.o it must be the farmer that lives so near.it must be the farmer so cunning, so cunning?they have passed the farmyard already, dear,and now they are running.o where are you going?

stay with me here!were the vows you swore deceiving, deceiving?no, i promised to love you, dear,but i must be leaving.o it's broken the lock and splintered the door,o it's the gate where they're turning, turning;their boots are heavy on the floorand their eyes are burning.. - w.h.auden.

Anony Mous

When they kick at your front door
How you gonna come?
With your hands on your head
Or on the trigger of your gun

When the law break in
How you gonna go?
Shot down on the pavement
Or waiting on death row

You can crush us
You can bruise us
But you'll have to answer to
Oh, the guns of Brixton

a bit later

You know it means no mercy

They caught him with a gun

The Clash - The Guns of Brixton

That song was written in the late 70's about the paranoia of living in an apocalyptic version of Brixton within the context of a Cold War while all sorts of rights were quickly eroded away by the government. The whole album is just chilling if you compare it to what policy makers have actually already done in London and the UK in general (the constant surveillance, the erasure of property, speech and gun rights)

It seems those things have come so close to true, not just in the UK but across the 'western world' where democracy once reigned.