He's not being sarcastic, he's a genuine MAGA till death type. Death, in this case, from measles-viral-pneumonia, secondary bacterial pneumonia, acute encephalitis, SSPE, MIBE, secondary infections, and pregnancy complications.

There's loads of obvious other causes besides hORdEs oF iLleGalS:
1. Travel-related importations are the most important source, meaning US residents who travel abroad, get infected, and return home. For example, unvaxxed missionaries returning with infections caught overseas and spreading them among their unvaxxed brethren, as described above by an AC
2. International visitors: tourists, business travelers and temporary workers, and migrants including refugees.
Amplification happens among, above all, local clusters with high vaccine refusal rates, and then to a much lesser extent among kids who have yet to be vaccinated, the immunocompromised, people whose vaccinations have waned and people whose vaccinations weren't as effective as they ought to have been. Local clusters with high refusal rates see the highest rates of amplification because they're ideal hotbeds for the disease to spread (as always with the Christofascist right, every accusation is a confession).

This nas been the US pattern for many years, during the period when measles was eradicated: importation followed by local amplification. But by golly, RFK et al are doing their damndest to re-establish endemicity in the US, at which point, there'll be no need to worry about importation, because you'll be manufacturing your measles right there in the US, just the way Donny wants. It'll be one of the few examples of him delivering on that particular promise.

The reasons for assessing covid vaccines to be safe divide into (a) those that do relate to other vaccines, and (b) those that were specific to the covid vaccine testing program.

In (a), we have things like "we know how vaccines work because we've administered literally billions of doses and amassed vast knowledge about human immunology" and "we know how statistical power works in giving us good insights into treatment safety and efficacy" and "vaccine side effects show up quickly, consistent with their pharmacodynamics" and "endpoint accrual depends on event rates and sample size".

In (b), we have "statistical power means that larger trials give faster and more accurate insights into safety and efficacy, and covid vaccine trials were about 20 times larger than a standard trial for a pharmaceutical" and "recruitment and dropouts are the bane of standard trials, but for the covid vaccines there were enormous numbers of people volunteering so recruitment including followup recruitment for dropouts was much faster" and "high community incidence drove very high event rates, meaning endpoint accrual was much faster than for a standard trial". Endpoint accrual scales about linearly with sample size, so the covid trials reached the required endpoint count 20x faster than a standard trial. The net effect of this and all those other factors like recruitment and community incidence was that the trials reached statistical power in three to four months vs two to three years. Standard errors shrink by sqrt 20, ie about 4.5, so confidence intervals are 4.5x narrower for the same observed rates, and effect estimates are 4.5x more precise. Rare safety event detection improves about 10 fold, ie you can spot 1 in 10k rarity events with a 40k person trial where a 2k trial could only spot 1 in 1k rarity events. Etc.

Finally, we need to consider that covid vaccines were rolled out on the scale of billions of doses, meaning that we have giant quantities of data from vast numbers of countries and populations, giving us extraordinary post-launch insights into the vaccines' safety and efficacy. It's not like a CF drug which is taken by a handful of people, and where rare events can remain undetectable.

We have *hugely* better insight into covid vaccine safety and efficacy than we normally get for a treatment, because of all of the above.

As always with this sort of story, whether it's "vaccines aren't properly tested" or which groups are most likely to abuse children etc, the story is the inversion of the truth.

... with a metric ton of salt, but on the demographics of China and their impact he seems spot on. And let's be honest, there's not that much you can get wrong here. It's quite simple math.

In the blue States it's generally individual cops getting caught doing it. Albeit a lot but still individual cops.

In the red States it's coming down from the top that's the difference. It's because corruption at the top is more common in a red state than a blue state.

This is to be expected if you understand how left and right wing politics work.

In a red State you have a right Wing state. So you have people that are prone to hierarchical structures and obedience.

That's going to encourage corruption because the people at the top will view themselves as being absolutely in charge and the people beneath them will encourage that view. It's why Trump can get away with committing so many crimes and the public still loves him.

A hierarchical command structure versus a democratic command structure is going to lend itself to top down corruption more often and the corruption is going to be worse. There is just no getting away from that or the consequences of right-wing politics.

The courts put the brakes on some of that firing, then Trump and Musk parted ways, mostly because it's impossible for two egos that swollen to fit in the same room for long.

Well right now, abortion has been all but banned in a number of states. Health insurance no longer has to cover birth control (even though it's a cheap way to reduce medical expenses). So it looks like the down side is happening anyway. It's the upside that is MIA.

That's the crazy part, the parents all got the vaccine before entering school because THEIR parents did the right thing.

Lincoln was a Free Soiler. He may have had a moral aversion to slavery, but it was secondary to his economic concerns. He believed that slavery could continue in the South but should not be extended into the western territories, primarily because it limited economic opportunities for white laborers, who would otherwise have to compete with enslaved workers.

From an economic perspective, he was right. The Southern slave system enriched a small aristocratic elite—roughly 5% of whites—while offering poor whites very limited upward mobility.

The politics of the era were far more complicated than the simplified narrative of a uniformly radical abolitionist North confronting a uniformly pro-secession South. This oversimplification is largely an artifact of neo-Confederate historical revisionism. In reality, the North was deeply racist by modern standards, support for Southern secession was far from universal, and many secession conventions were marked by severe democratic irregularities, including voter intimidation.

The current coalescence of anti-science attitudes and neo-Confederate interpretations of the Civil War is not accidental. Both reflect a willingness to supplant scholarship with narratives that are more “correct” ideologically. This tendency is universal—everyone does it to some degree—but in these cases, it is profoundly anti-intellectual: inconvenient evidence is simply ignored or dismissed. As in the antebellum South, this lack of critical thought is being exploited to entrench an economic elite. It keeps people focused on fears over vaccinations or immigrant labor while policies serving elite interests are quietly enacted.

... within this decade. And he's been doing that for a while. And his reasoning sounds plausible.

Plenty of stories of DUI abuse in Blue states as well. One of the grant programs allowed "one and done" checkpoints, so one corrupt cop padded his retirement by doing DUI checkpoints, citing the first car through, closing the checkpoint (getting paid for 8 hours of OT), and reporting for an extra shift an hour later doing the same crap. He had over 40 days last year where he was paid for more than 26 hours!

Are actively hiding their economic data. We are going to have a 1930s style economic collapse.

All the pieces are here. We are in the middle of a industrial revolution with massive amounts of automation and technological unemployment without any significant new employment opportunities on the horizon. Seriously sit down and write out what the jobs are going to be after automation and ai and machine learning rip through the economy. You can't just go and make cars after the buggy whip factory shuts down when the car factory is also automated.

Next we have a huge economic bubble where we are spending trillions of dollars specifically AI infrastructure spending and the massive bank loans that go with it.

And we have widespread drought resulting in crop failures and increasing food prices. Even if you don't believe climate change and the water cycle breaking is the problem the drought is still real.

This is everything that led up to world war I at world war II.

We have the technology to stop this but we don't have the education and critical thinking and social structures to stop it...

My local PD purchased one a few years ago, but they are yet to actually put it to beneficial use.

Seriously. I understand the bomb squad needs robots that's a good thing. But every year a crime goes down and every year we put more cops with better weapons and more weapons on the street.

I understand what's going on with all that immigration enforcement bullshit. There's a bunch of bitter old assholes who get off on seeing people slammed into the ground.

But is there really that many people for whom the pleasure of watching a couple of Mexicans get dragged into a black van by masked goons is enough to make them A-Okay with this bullshit?

I just had to get the new fancy license and they made me take my glasses off because they're using facial recognition now.

One of the funny things I keep seeing over and over again is confused white people in the middle class pulled over by cops and harassed the same way they're used to seeing "those people" harassed.

The place where it's really showing up is DUIs. In several red states with heavy duty police enforcement there is a ton of stories about people getting pulled over and arrested and losing their license when they were Stone Cold sober. There are a couple of big scandals where the local police were just told you need to get your arrest numbers up or else.

DUI is really popular for that because the cops can arrest you without cause or proof and it takes months before it comes out that you were innocent. Meanwhile your license is suspended.

The fact that they're doing this to the in group is a massive red flag. It's a huge shift in how things work.

Apparently nobody learned anything from the FalconStrike crash.