It sucks, etc etc,... Yes this is true, but I don't think life actually changes significantly if the anti gets vaccinated anyway.
The vaccination doesn't kill the virus, you only have less symptoms so you can still spread it if you happen to get it. And thus you can spread it still to those having decreased immune systems. People with decreased immune systems are still rendered to isolation for quite some time until an effective enough version of the vaccination is made for them. Their bubble remains.
For a long while, kids will need to stay at home because of regulations anyhow. My daughter has had sniffles already 6x this year and had to miss 2-4 days of school each time, to get a test and to alleviate symptoms (in all cases no covid found). And then she has to play catch up every few weeks which is so frustrating to a 6 year old who enjoys reading and writing, but is now overloaded with it time in time again (which means she starts to dislike it a bit again).
The impactful thing of the vaccination is less hospitalizations, and that is already achieved for the population that is vaccinated. In my country about 80% of hospitalizations is people who are not vaccinated due to mere choice, the remaining 20% are some outliers, immune deficient people, and those that got long covid from over half a year ago.
And this will not change soon because new strains will appear towards which the vaccines are less effective making us start all over again until pharma can predict the bad mutants better.
Wow, what state (or country) are you in? Here in Michigan a child has to have a fever or multiple symptoms, not just sniffles, to have to stay home. Fever is still by far the most common symptom. Kids have sniffles like, constantly!
I say 'Amen' to Congress taking their power back and sitting at the table as an equal to POTUS and SCOTUS. For too long they've been sitting on their asses enjoying all the privileges and bemoaning how 'powerless' they are against the President and Supreme Court.
The newest demand from Manchin (they don't seem to ever end) is that the child tax credit be capped at $60,000 household income. You really gotta love how some people think two people BARELY making 30k each with two or three kids are somehow rolling in money and living the lifestyle of the rich and famous. 60k would definitely feel wealthy if you are SINGLE. For a family of 4 or 5, that is paycheck to paycheck. There is a general consensus among Washington politicians that you're only "poor" if you are a household pulling in less than 20k a year. So often you see this complete disconnect with how much money it costs to live from people who simply never have to worry about money as being a factor.
The newest demand from Manchin (they don't seem to ever end) is that the child tax credit be capped at $60,000 household income. You really gotta love how some people think two people BARELY making 30k each with two or three kids are somehow rolling in money and living the lifestyle of the rich and famous. 60k would definitely feel wealthy if you are SINGLE. For a family of 4 or 5, that is paycheck to paycheck. There is a general consensus among Washington politicians that you're only "poor" if you are a household pulling in less than 20k a year. So often you see this complete disconnect with how much money it costs to live from people who simply never have to worry about money as being a factor.
That's because most of the people running this country are a bunch of fossils...
It's a good read. I don't have a strong opinion on the issue of taxing income or wealth. I guess the latter makes more sense.
This line is really funny: "Before he became president, for example, Donald Trump used to boast of being worth over $10 billion, based on the valuation he imputed to his own brand, while critical observers questioned whether he was a billionaire at all."
Yesterday I was watching some random Japanese drama on Chinese platform and was told by comments that in the drama, news reports about a virus "originated in Wuhan" were censored. I guess "we are the true victims" is gonna be our common sense in the future.
Also maybe you won't expect it, but lesbian/yuri content face way more restrictions than gay/BL in China. For example in that drama I watched, a gay couple were left untouched and every line about a women having feelings about another were twisted like "I respected you (I liked you)." "…I was different (…I liked women rather than men)". I guess that's what happens when birth rate drops and the Big Brother just don't like women "wasting their wombs"
Trump got discussed a lot, in what his rise & that of the new form of fairly unscrupulous right means for Democracy in general. Sometimes other right-wing movements (e.g. in Poland and Brazil) are also discussed.
But what I think gets too little attention in Sebastian Kurz in Austria. It's quite chilling in the implications: it's an ambitious, reasonably smart and charismatic right-wing politician who successfully manipulated polls and the media to push him in the spot-light & seemingly sabotaged the government in which he was a minister - all in order to successfully get him to the Chancellorship at an unprecedented young age.
I'd see him as potentially much more dangerous than Trump - it's just that Austria obviously has a lot less power and influence on the global stage.
More on the birth rate topic: while birth rate drops were observed across East Asia and were often seen as the result of improved education for women, there's more to it here. Maybe you already know about "family planning" or one-child policy, along with the obvious result of a constrictive population pyramid, the strong preference of male babies in our traditional culture pushed parents to gender selection.
Jiang Quanbao, a demography professor at Xian Jiaotong University, said: “It is estimated that between 1980 and 2020, about 30 million to 40 million more males were born [in China] than females, so there is a shortage of brides.”
No matter what strategy you use (like continuously having new children until you get a boy, which is also not uncommon), as long as you don't get rid of some of them, the natural m/f ratio should always be around 1, so that equals over 30 million females that didn't make it to this world. Also involun-you know the word are considered a destabilizing factor, that's one more big problem over similar countries like Japan and SK.
To make things even worse, the dropping birth rate forced the government to allow 2 or 3 children per family in recent years, yet many chose to "give it a shot" on their firstborn then ensure a boy with their 2nd or 3rd. As a result in some cities and provinces the specific m/f ratio of 3rd newborns went up to somewhere like 1.5, which means parents are even more willing to abort their daughters in that situation.
Feels like something broke in the UK today, this MP was guilty as sin of using his influence in return for £100k plus to lobby for a private company, arranging meetings where they were turned down when requested by normal official routes, using his parliamentary office so the private company got millions of pounds in covid contracts without any tender pricess etc. There was a rigorous process involving members of all parties deciding the outcome which is that there was very significant impropriety.
The proposed sanction was 30 days, yes that's right, 30 days PAID suspension and that was too much for his crooked boss.
If this went on in a third world country it would be named by the tories as what it is, corruption.
If I did anything like this I would never work again as a lawyer. Cripes, depressing.
Feels like something broke in the UK today, this MP was guilty as sin of using his influence in return for £100k plus to lobby for a private company, arranging meetings where they were turned down when requested by normal official routes, using his parliamentary office so the private company got millions of pounds in covid contracts without any tender pricess etc. There was a rigorous process involving members of all parties deciding the outcome which is that there was very significant impropriety.
The proposed sanction was 30 days, yes that's right, 30 days PAID suspension and that was too much for his crooked boss.
If this went on in a third world country it would be named by the tories as what it is, corruption.
If I did anything like this I would never work again as a lawyer. Cripes, depressing.
The suspension can act as a trigger to force a by-election, so it is a significant sanction. In relation to the main point though, I agree that changing the rules in this way to protect one person seems immoral. I also think it shows poor political judgement from Johnson. Telling his MPs to vote for the change opens the Conservatives up to accusations of sleaze and dragging up the memory of the expenses scandal a dozen years ago. The fact that 13 Conservative MPs voted against the government and 98 more didn't vote is evidence of pretty widespread unease about the future potential impact of this.
Yes that is true about the by election. Seems a pretty lenient system already though when compared to that faced in most other roles with far less scope for corruption. I can be struck off for accepting very small gifts that might compromise my integrity, with no by election etc.
I think Johnson is somewhat held to ransom by the hard right of the tories and has his own cleanliness and standards issues coming up which mean he would be happy to tear apart all checks and balances.
Feels like something broke in the UK today, this MP was guilty as sin of using his influence in return for £100k plus to lobby for a private company, arranging meetings where they were turned down when requested by normal official routes, using his parliamentary office so the private company got millions of pounds in covid contracts without any tender pricess etc. There was a rigorous process involving members of all parties deciding the outcome which is that there was very significant impropriety.
The proposed sanction was 30 days, yes that's right, 30 days PAID suspension and that was too much for his crooked boss.
If this went on in a third world country it would be named by the tories as what it is, corruption.
If I did anything like this I would never work again as a lawyer. Cripes, depressing.
The suspension can act as a trigger to force a by-election, so it is a significant sanction. In relation to the main point though, I agree that changing the rules in this way to protect one person seems immoral. I also think it shows poor political judgement from Johnson. Telling his MPs to vote for the change opens the Conservatives up to accusations of sleaze and dragging up the memory of the expenses scandal a dozen years ago. The fact that 13 Conservative MPs voted against the government and 98 more didn't vote is evidence of pretty widespread unease about the future potential impact of this.
And Paterson heard the fat lady start to warm up and has decided to resign ...
This is a bit of an aside, but I cant help but notice a ton of the reporting around this particular issue keeps calling it "Sleazy". While the word seems reasonable in the circumstances, it is so often repeated that I cannot help but wonder if it has any particular historical reference to British corruption, historically. Anything to that?
We didnt really bring it up, but Youngkin won in VA (my state) the other night. TMac ran a pretty awful campaign, and there's a ton of disdain and backlash towards national Democrats right now. It's a pretty bleak environment.
I am hopeful that Youngkin will be more moderate. He certainly tried to present himself as such, but I cannot help but wonder if Heartbeat bills are around the corner. Since the governor of Virginia is term limited to one term, I could see him either A - Going more conservative, since he wont have to defend his record in 4 years, B - Staying less conservative in hopes he can spin a successful governorship into a Senate bid.
It was a pretty right-leaning election environment in a lot of places. Seattle even elected a Republican to citywide office. Specifically, that's the city attorney position, notably responsible for policy on what minor crimes get prosecuted. It's a nonpartisan position, but the two candidates were extremely far apart ideologically - the status quo candidate in the middle lost in the primary.
(All right, there's no official concession yet, and it'll be fairly close. 58-41 in election night returns, and late-arriving ballots can be expected to eat up half to two thirds of that lead.)
There wasn't really anything about national issues in the various local elections here; it's just a matter of who bothered to vote amid the overall low turnout. Nothing beyond the county level, not much interest.
And Paterson heard the fat lady start to warm up and has decided to resign ...
This is a bit of an aside, but I cant help but notice a ton of the reporting around this particular issue keeps calling it "Sleazy". While the word seems reasonable in the circumstances, it is so often repeated that I cannot help but wonder if it has any particular historical reference to British corruption, historically. Anything to that?
I don't think that there's any particular historical relevance. The word appeared around the 1960s in the context of loose sexual morals, but wasn't applied to political life until 1980. That was originally in the US, but has now largely been co-opted by the UK - I think just because the word sounds good for a sound bite and looks good on the page to sell newspapers.
A bit like with the ubiquitous use of "...gate" "sleaze" now is a useful shorthand to make political accusations. The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, whose decision in the Paterson case was being attacked, is often referred to as the "sleaze watchdog" or similar in the media, which helps reinforce the use of the word.
Though it's difficult to be certain, my impression is that levels of corruption in British politics are actually pretty low compared to other countries. However, the public tolerance of corruption in public life is also low, which means that instances of problems can be very newsworthy. Instances of such flare-ups include the "cash for questions" scandal in the 1990s and the expenses scandal of 2009 (checking the date of that I found it hard to believe so much time has passed since then ).
The former resulted in a strengthening of the codes of conduct system that's still largely the way political life is regulated outside Parliament (see this article for a brief explanation). The latter resulted in the current system of a Parliamentary Commissioner who takes a hard line on corruption. That's something that many MPs dislike as a result of being found in breach of rules where they believed they were operating safely in a grey area. Boris Johnson's morals in relation to his personal behavior are pretty flexible and he's one of those MPs who's fallen foul of the Commissioner - and that I think is the major source of his political misjudgment in trying to use the Paterson case to change the system of Parliamentary regulation ...
Hah, I love it! This is the absolute truth about climate policy. The left in the West wants to feel good about themselves so they throw crumbs out to the poor countries (with strings attached). At least the right aren't hypocrites about raping the planet. They cherry-pick Darwinist and Christian morality in order to parade their 'superiority' and justify their actions. No party that actually admits the facts in this article, and makes any real plan to act on it would have a prayer of being elected in any Western democracy.
China, India, and Russia did not even bother attending the recent climate summit. If you are concerned about making progress on that topic then I wish you good luck--without them on board progress will not be made.
In China climate change is viewed 80% as western's evil lie to prevent developing countries from catching up, and 20% as "white lefties" doing their daily self-destruction like everything else. Don't expect anything.
China, India, and Russia did not even bother attending the recent climate summit. If you are concerned about making progress on that topic then I wish you good luck--without them on board progress will not be made.
Worth noting that any reduction in greenhouse gases over what they otherwise would have been is progress. I just can't agree with this doom and gloom view. A somewhat hot future is still preferable over an extremely hot future.
Yes, people in places like the US and Europe only have so much influence over the rest of the world. That's not an excuse to do nothing.
China, India, and Russia did not even bother attending the recent climate summit. If you are concerned about making progress on that topic then I wish you good luck--without them on board progress will not be made.
Worth noting that any reduction in greenhouse gases over what they otherwise would have been is progress. I just can't agree with this doom and gloom view. A somewhat hot future is still preferable over an extremely hot future.
Yes, people in places like the US and Europe only have so much influence over the rest of the world. That's not an excuse to do nothing.
This. All of this.
Climate change is a world wide problem. Its effects are unequal (it will hit the "Global South" worse than than elsewhere). It's contributors are unequal as well. It is an objective moral and ethical good to reduce the effects of climate change on the environment, even if that reduction comes more from one place (the USA) than another place (India).
I have sympathies for the fact that climate change policies will harm sectors of the economy (and therefore, people in those sectors) - and strongly feel that society should do what it can to ameliorate that harm.
As far as the United States taking action on climate, note that Republicans do not have a majority in either house of Congress. If the Senate would do away with the filibuster rule like many of them keep saying should happen then Democrats in Congress could pass whatever climate legislation they pleased and the Senate could ratify the Paris Accords as an actual treaty (even before the previous Administration withdrew from it the Paris Accords was not a treaty and therefore had no ability to be enforced)...if it *wanted* to. Apparently even they don't see it is an actual priority or they would do something about it.
edit/add: note that this is neither a condemnation of nor a commendation of any policy for or against climate change, merely noting that if Congress wanted to do something about it then it would do so. Many of them say they want to and the party currently in the minority cannot stop them so why are they hesitating?
Treaties are ratified by a 2/3 vote in the Senate, not a simple majority. This is constitutional (Article II, section 2), and has nothing to do with the filibuster. Although, as current procedure stands, that hurdle would also have to be overcome.
edit to add: Also, doing some digging all this is moot. The agreement isn't a formal treaty (it's non-binding too). And Trump's "withdrawal" wasn't real anyways, as states couldn't withdraw in the first four years. Rather he announced a plan to withdraw after that period. A plan that was scrapped by Biden via executive order on his first day in office. So the Democrats have already done the thing you clamored for.
To the other point -I'm fundamentally against getting rid of the Filibuster. I know plenty of people (mostly on the left) arent, but my justification has always been that the structural advantages current massively favor the GOP (Due to a ton of reasons: The way the Senate was created. They Gerrymander much more/harder than Democrats, Legislation to reduce the number of people in the House of Representatives, etc).
Right now, I think it's reasonable to say that for the next 50 years: The GOP will control both houses about 40% of the time. It'll be mixed about 40% of the time, and Dem controlled 20% of the time. It would be yet another way to give the GOP the upper hand.
Those percentages will slide around a bit. The effect where the opposition wins in Mid Terms will probably hurt Democrats more in general because, as has been parroted on here a million times, the Democratic candidate for President has won the popular vote every time but twice in the last 33 years. 7 of the past 9 elections saw the popular vote go to Democrats. Barring some serious anti-democratic shenanigans, I expect the sitting president over the next 50 years to be a Democrat more often than a Republican.
Comments
Wow, what state (or country) are you in? Here in Michigan a child has to have a fever or multiple symptoms, not just sniffles, to have to stay home. Fever is still by far the most common symptom. Kids have sniffles like, constantly!
https://www.thedailybeast.com/steve-bannon-just-might-be-accidentally-saving-america
https://theweek.com/politics/1006496/taxes-are-supposed-to-serve-the-common-good-americans-turned-them-into-punishment
It's a good read. I don't have a strong opinion on the issue of taxing income or wealth. I guess the latter makes more sense.
This line is really funny: "Before he became president, for example, Donald Trump used to boast of being worth over $10 billion, based on the valuation he imputed to his own brand, while critical observers questioned whether he was a billionaire at all."
Also maybe you won't expect it, but lesbian/yuri content face way more restrictions than gay/BL in China. For example in that drama I watched, a gay couple were left untouched and every line about a women having feelings about another were twisted like "I respected you (I liked you)." "…I was different (…I liked women rather than men)". I guess that's what happens when birth rate drops and the Big Brother just don't like women "wasting their wombs"
But what I think gets too little attention in Sebastian Kurz in Austria. It's quite chilling in the implications: it's an ambitious, reasonably smart and charismatic right-wing politician who successfully manipulated polls and the media to push him in the spot-light & seemingly sabotaged the government in which he was a minister - all in order to successfully get him to the Chancellorship at an unprecedented young age.
I'd see him as potentially much more dangerous than Trump - it's just that Austria obviously has a lot less power and influence on the global stage.
Odd--I did not think that age discrimination was still a thing. Perhaps I did not get the memo....
Anyway....here are the current poverty guidelines in effect in the United States. Congress could update these numbers at any time if it *wanted* to.
Wow, @Mathsorcerer appears out of nowhere- a real blast from the past!
Of course there's age discrimination in the US. Apparently you have to be older than 70 to run for president now... ?
To make things even worse, the dropping birth rate forced the government to allow 2 or 3 children per family in recent years, yet many chose to "give it a shot" on their firstborn then ensure a boy with their 2nd or 3rd. As a result in some cities and provinces the specific m/f ratio of 3rd newborns went up to somewhere like 1.5, which means parents are even more willing to abort their daughters in that situation.
Feels like something broke in the UK today, this MP was guilty as sin of using his influence in return for £100k plus to lobby for a private company, arranging meetings where they were turned down when requested by normal official routes, using his parliamentary office so the private company got millions of pounds in covid contracts without any tender pricess etc. There was a rigorous process involving members of all parties deciding the outcome which is that there was very significant impropriety.
The proposed sanction was 30 days, yes that's right, 30 days PAID suspension and that was too much for his crooked boss.
If this went on in a third world country it would be named by the tories as what it is, corruption.
If I did anything like this I would never work again as a lawyer. Cripes, depressing.
The suspension can act as a trigger to force a by-election, so it is a significant sanction. In relation to the main point though, I agree that changing the rules in this way to protect one person seems immoral. I also think it shows poor political judgement from Johnson. Telling his MPs to vote for the change opens the Conservatives up to accusations of sleaze and dragging up the memory of the expenses scandal a dozen years ago. The fact that 13 Conservative MPs voted against the government and 98 more didn't vote is evidence of pretty widespread unease about the future potential impact of this.
I think Johnson is somewhat held to ransom by the hard right of the tories and has his own cleanliness and standards issues coming up which mean he would be happy to tear apart all checks and balances.
It didn't take the government long to realize they were on a hiding to nothing. Even with the quick retreat though some of the damage is likely to stick.
This is a bit of an aside, but I cant help but notice a ton of the reporting around this particular issue keeps calling it "Sleazy". While the word seems reasonable in the circumstances, it is so often repeated that I cannot help but wonder if it has any particular historical reference to British corruption, historically. Anything to that?
We didnt really bring it up, but Youngkin won in VA (my state) the other night. TMac ran a pretty awful campaign, and there's a ton of disdain and backlash towards national Democrats right now. It's a pretty bleak environment.
I am hopeful that Youngkin will be more moderate. He certainly tried to present himself as such, but I cannot help but wonder if Heartbeat bills are around the corner. Since the governor of Virginia is term limited to one term, I could see him either A - Going more conservative, since he wont have to defend his record in 4 years, B - Staying less conservative in hopes he can spin a successful governorship into a Senate bid.
We'll have to see.
(All right, there's no official concession yet, and it'll be fairly close. 58-41 in election night returns, and late-arriving ballots can be expected to eat up half to two thirds of that lead.)
There wasn't really anything about national issues in the various local elections here; it's just a matter of who bothered to vote amid the overall low turnout. Nothing beyond the county level, not much interest.
I don't think that there's any particular historical relevance. The word appeared around the 1960s in the context of loose sexual morals, but wasn't applied to political life until 1980. That was originally in the US, but has now largely been co-opted by the UK - I think just because the word sounds good for a sound bite and looks good on the page to sell newspapers.
A bit like with the ubiquitous use of "...gate" "sleaze" now is a useful shorthand to make political accusations. The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, whose decision in the Paterson case was being attacked, is often referred to as the "sleaze watchdog" or similar in the media, which helps reinforce the use of the word.
Though it's difficult to be certain, my impression is that levels of corruption in British politics are actually pretty low compared to other countries. However, the public tolerance of corruption in public life is also low, which means that instances of problems can be very newsworthy. Instances of such flare-ups include the "cash for questions" scandal in the 1990s and the expenses scandal of 2009 (checking the date of that I found it hard to believe so much time has passed since then
The former resulted in a strengthening of the codes of conduct system that's still largely the way political life is regulated outside Parliament (see this article for a brief explanation). The latter resulted in the current system of a Parliamentary Commissioner who takes a hard line on corruption. That's something that many MPs dislike as a result of being found in breach of rules where they believed they were operating safely in a grey area. Boris Johnson's morals in relation to his personal behavior are pretty flexible and he's one of those MPs who's fallen foul of the Commissioner - and that I think is the major source of his political misjudgment in trying to use the Paterson case to change the system of Parliamentary regulation ...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/05/the-climate-crisis-is-just-another-form-of-global-oppression-by-the-rich-world
Worth noting that any reduction in greenhouse gases over what they otherwise would have been is progress. I just can't agree with this doom and gloom view. A somewhat hot future is still preferable over an extremely hot future.
Yes, people in places like the US and Europe only have so much influence over the rest of the world. That's not an excuse to do nothing.
This. All of this.
Climate change is a world wide problem. Its effects are unequal (it will hit the "Global South" worse than than elsewhere). It's contributors are unequal as well. It is an objective moral and ethical good to reduce the effects of climate change on the environment, even if that reduction comes more from one place (the USA) than another place (India).
I have sympathies for the fact that climate change policies will harm sectors of the economy (and therefore, people in those sectors) - and strongly feel that society should do what it can to ameliorate that harm.
edit/add: note that this is neither a condemnation of nor a commendation of any policy for or against climate change, merely noting that if Congress wanted to do something about it then it would do so. Many of them say they want to and the party currently in the minority cannot stop them so why are they hesitating?
edit to add: Also, doing some digging all this is moot. The agreement isn't a formal treaty (it's non-binding too). And Trump's "withdrawal" wasn't real anyways, as states couldn't withdraw in the first four years. Rather he announced a plan to withdraw after that period. A plan that was scrapped by Biden via executive order on his first day in office. So the Democrats have already done the thing you clamored for.
Right now, I think it's reasonable to say that for the next 50 years: The GOP will control both houses about 40% of the time. It'll be mixed about 40% of the time, and Dem controlled 20% of the time. It would be yet another way to give the GOP the upper hand.
Those percentages will slide around a bit. The effect where the opposition wins in Mid Terms will probably hurt Democrats more in general because, as has been parroted on here a million times, the Democratic candidate for President has won the popular vote every time but twice in the last 33 years. 7 of the past 9 elections saw the popular vote go to Democrats. Barring some serious anti-democratic shenanigans, I expect the sitting president over the next 50 years to be a Democrat more often than a Republican.