"Think what we please, and say what we think—how better to sum up the happiness of political freedom? And the reverse is pure tyranny."
- A History of Knowledge, Charles Van Doren.
Instead of seeing the bright side of life, in which this person clearly vastly improved their situation in life, all they can see is what they don’t have.
“I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because I had the only fat body in the building.”
I’m sorry, but no, being poor doesn’t make you fat. Your eating choices make you fat. Poor people have agency too. Agency is not something you buy. This is coming from someone who probably makes half of what you make in a year.
Facebook this week appended a Wall Street Journal op-ed “We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April” by Johns Hopkins surgeon Marty Makary (Feb. 19) with the label “Missing Context. Independent fact-checkers say this information could mislead people.” According to Facebook, “Once we have a rating from a fact-checking partner, we take action by ensuring that fewer people see that misinformation.”
The question is, how did this start just now? In 2020? How is the COVID-19 vaccine the first to use mRNA? Anyone with who has taken AP Biology could conceive of and understand the idea behind making vaccines rapidly: take some mRNA, inject it, have in translated as the antigen in the body. Poof, that's it. I feel like the development of mRNA drugs should have started in the 70's or 80's. It isn't exactly high-tech or clever.
“Many hypotheses proposed by scientists as well as by nonscientists turn out to be wrong. But science is a self-correcting enterprise. To be accepted, all new ideas must survive rigorous standards of evidence. The worst aspect of the Velikovsky affair is not that his hypotheses were wrong or in contradiction to firmly established facts, but that some who called themselves scientists attempted to suppress Velikovsky's work. Science is generated by and devoted to free inquiry: the idea that any hypothesis, no matter how strange, deserves to be considered on its merits. The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no place in the endeavor of science. We do not know in advance who will discover fundamental new insights.”
From the abstract: "We demonstrate a range of pre-existing memory CD4+ T cells that are cross-reactive with comparable affinity to SARS-CoV-2 and the common cold coronaviruses HCoV-OC43, HCoV-229E, HCoV-NL63, or HCoV-HKU1."
1. Populations may naturally have a head start towards herd immunity from COVID.
2. Sweden could be really close in that regard; their current super low daily mortality and declining cases may point towards herd immunity.
“Los Angeles County, which has recorded the highest number of coronavirus cases and deaths in California, has extended stay-at-home orders indefinitely.”
Lockdowns are effective as tourniquets, but indefinite or long term use was never logical. There should have been more forward-thinking and pragmatic options pushed earlier. We will now see the natural repercussions of lockdown-centered policies.