American Politics

[Xpartan]

I've kind of been guilty of the same thing, obsessing about COVID prevention, although it's out of scientific curiosity rather than being overly pious, which I think you recognize. Our exchanges on the vaccines, etc. are always respectful. And I've learned some things from your posts that I didn't know before, for example, that masks aren't nearly as effective against the Omicron variant as they appear to have been earlier on.

At this point in time, your chance of getting AIDS in the USA is pretty darn low if you're not engaged in butt fucking or intravenous drug use. There are a lot of other things to be more concerned about. That said, if I'd religiously worn condoms, my life would be much different. I wish I'd done that, for reasons totally unrelated to HIV.

While I agree that the chance is low, it's not zero. My beef with Elvis is that he claims one can't get HIV and AIDS from a heterosexual contact. He also likes to site some studies, usually from 20-30 year ago that supposedly support his phantasies. There is no validity in that kind of argument. Even when the studies are legit, scientific knowledge in epidemiology is not finite. Here are some recent stats, and I don't have a reason not to believe them.

https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overv...nds/statistics

- Approximately 1. 2 million people in the US have HIV. About 13 percent of them don't know it and need testing.

- People who acquired HIV through heterosexual contact made up 22% (6,626) of HIV diagnoses in the USA In 2020.

- People assigned male sex at birth who acquired HIV through heterosexual contact accounted for 7% of new HIV diagnoses.

- People assigned female sex at birth who acquired HIV through heterosexual women accounted for 15%.

There are good news too:

- From 2016 to 2019, HIV diagnoses from heterosexual contact decreased 13% overall.

So, basically 1/5 of the USA HIV positive population gets the virus from a heterosexual contact, twice as many women as men.

Can we accept these numbers as fireproof evidence? No.

As Dr. House said, people lie. No one knows how many respondents are closet homosexuals or drug addicts. So yes, the number can be lower than 7%. Or it may be higher; let's not forget that 13 percent of new cases "don't know it and need testing. ".

But in any case, for a male, 7% may sound like low odds, but low is not zero.

Now there are people who believe that everything the government says is a lie. Them -- I can't help. No one can.

Unfortunately, Elvis is one of those people. He claims the HIV transmission among heterosexuals is zero. That's not just a harmless quackery; that's dangerous because some people on this forum just want to believe.

And BTW, if he keeps claiming he's never said it, I will find the old thread where he did, no matter how lazy I am.

P.S. I would address Elvis directly, but he seems to believe he "ignores me", although he's probably just confused about what ignore means, LOL.

[Tiny 12]

Your sister-in-law reminded me of an interesting high school principal in Britain whom I read and later watched a documentary about, called Katherine Birbalsingh.

Her school is in a black area of inner city London, with all the usual social problems one has come to expect from such places. All the nearby schools are absolute failures, like those in Baltimore. Yet her school is phenomenally successful. It has huge numbers of students accepted by top universities....

Fascinating story Chris. Thanks for taking the time to write that up. As you say, the teachers unions are so entrenched that it would be difficult to duplicate that on a nationwide basis here. I don't fault all the teachers, as there are many like Katherine Birbalsingh and my sister-in-law. It would be great if people like them were in charge.

[Tiny 12]

Yeah, it is dogma with Tooms and Xpartan. Tooms quotes Xpartan who has for the millionth time says to everyone, "Elvis is saying you cannot get AIDS with condom less sex" as if Tooms is making this profound point when he is showing he has been swallowed up with dogma.

Facts are CDC said one million Americans had HIV / AIDS for years. There was an internal debate on whether to focus on high risk groups (IV drug abusers, gay men) or scare the shit out of everyone. Fauci was in the latter camp, and that POV won out. CDC got billions in funding and ruined the sex lives of many straight man. About a decade later, CDC cut the number of people with HIV / AIDS in half to 500,000. And this is the same crap they are doing now with Covid with Biden in office.

Once the CDC's bullshit predictions failed to came true, 60 millions Americans are going to get AIDS!, the story was that maybe AIDS was not spreading in the USA but it was spreading like wild fire in Africa. This was more bullshit, https://abrahamson.medill.northweste..._22Nov2001.pdf.

So what was the risk? No one knows what people really do in their bedroom, so scientists studied presumably straight married people where one person is HIV+. The rate of transmission was calculated and with straight sex, the estimated rate of transmission was between miniscule and nonexistent. Some studies showed no HIV transmission in hundreds of couples followed for years.

Those studies have been buried and for good reason. Now you find these drug studies that show if you take HIV medication before sex, the transmission rate is still zero! It is a miracle!

And missed in all this discussion is no one is talking abut the dangers of latex, one of the most allergenic materials on earth. So called "safe sex" with latex condoms is really anything but.

You are never going to get Tooms to admit he is wrong about anything. He is not posting facts or anything interesting. It is the same stuff again and again, and Xpartan is not showing anyone he is smart about AIDS. He is just a knucklehead who buys the government's bullshit and is shocked when anyone questions it. He is so mentally challenged he has no fucking clue what the HIV transmission rate between straight people really is or what the allergy rate with latex is.

I've kind of been guilty of the same thing, obsessing about COVID prevention, although it's out of scientific curiosity rather than being overly pious, which I think you recognize. Our exchanges on the vaccines, etc. are always respectful. And I've learned some things from your posts that I didn't know before, for example, that masks aren't nearly as effective against the Omicron variant as they appear to have been earlier on.

At this point in time, your chance of getting AIDS in the USA is pretty darn low if you're not engaged in butt fucking or intravenous drug use. There are a lot of other things to be more concerned about. That said, if I'd religiously worn condoms, my life would be much different. I wish I'd done that, for reasons totally unrelated to HIV.

[Tiny 12]

You are omitting / ignoring huge chunks of history. I don't know if that is deliberate or just lack of knowledge. The entire list of political interference is astonishing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United..._regime_change.

Just look at the list since WW2 and see how many were against socialist and people's movements, and how many led to the destruction of local economies, or the end of hope for local people due to the USA propping up dictators for financial gain.

Like I said, in general I agree with you that the USA shouldn't go around overthrowing governments and engaging in needless wars, which most of them are. The limited economic benefits the USA has received by engaging in these activities pale by the side of the negative overall effects on our economy and reputation. During peacetime since the end of World War II, we've spent 3% to 16% of GDP annually on defense, plus whatever costs were incurred in the interventions that aren't categorized as defense. The total profit, if any, that our corporations have gotten back from overthrowing regimes in Latin America, Africa and elsewhere is peanuts in comparison. The USA should stop trying to serve as the world's policeman. That's one of the reasons the national debt is $30 trillion.

That's an unsupported claim. I strongly disagree with all of it. Capitalism has hindered technology and improvements in the lives of billions of people. These improvments happened despite capitalism.

Here's a list of the biggest technological advances since 1844. Which of them would have been developed and used by billions without capitalism? I'd argue none.

https://www.lifewire.com/biggest-tec...e-1844-4588428

What happened to prosperity and quality of life of people in China and eastern Europe after market economies were introduced?

[Elvis 2008]

That's why Novak Djokovic wasn't able to play the US Open last fall, and it looks like this year too unless these clowns see sense (unlikely).

Good point, and he was denied playing in Australia one year as well. I cannot think of a better example of leftist paranoia on Covid than what happened with him.

[Elvis 2008]

We've refuted your assertions with facts.

Yeah, it is dogma with Tooms and Xpartan. Tooms quotes Xpartan who has for the millionth time says to everyone, "Elvis is saying you cannot get AIDS with condom less sex" as if Tooms is making this profound point when he is showing he has been swallowed up with dogma.

Facts are CDC said one million Americans had HIV / AIDS for years. There was an internal debate on whether to focus on high risk groups (IV drug abusers, gay men) or scare the shit out of everyone. Fauci was in the latter camp, and that POV won out. CDC got billions in funding and ruined the sex lives of many straight man. About a decade later, CDC cut the number of people with HIV / AIDS in half to 500,000. And this is the same crap they are doing now with Covid with Biden in office.

Once the CDC's bullshit predictions failed to came true, 60 millions Americans are going to get AIDS!, the story was that maybe AIDS was not spreading in the USA but it was spreading like wild fire in Africa. This was more bullshit, https://abrahamson.medill.northweste..._22Nov2001.pdf.

So what was the risk? No one knows what people really do in their bedroom, so scientists studied presumably straight married people where one person is HIV+. The rate of transmission was calculated and with straight sex, the estimated rate of transmission was between miniscule and nonexistent. Some studies showed no HIV transmission in hundreds of couples followed for years.

Those studies have been buried and for good reason. Now you find these drug studies that show if you take HIV medication before sex, the transmission rate is still zero! It is a miracle!

And missed in all this discussion is no one is talking abut the dangers of latex, one of the most allergenic materials on earth. So called "safe sex" with latex condoms is really anything but.

You are never going to get Tooms to admit he is wrong about anything. He is not posting facts or anything interesting. It is the same stuff again and again, and Xpartan is not showing anyone he is smart about AIDS. He is just a knucklehead who buys the government's bullshit and is shocked when anyone questions it. He is so mentally challenged he has no fucking clue what the HIV transmission rate between straight people really is or what the allergy rate with latex is.

[JustTK]

your argument may make sense in isolated instances, like the United Fruit Company in Central America, but they pale by the side of the lives and money we've wasted on wars. And on giving up commercial opportunities, like trade with Venezuela.

You are omitting / ignoring huge chunks of history. I don't know if that is deliberate or just lack of knowledge. The entire list of political interference is astonishing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United..._regime_change.

Just look at the list since WW2 and see how many were against socialist and people's movements, and how many led to the destruction of local economies, or the end of hope for local people due to the USA propping up dictators for financial gain.

I do not buy that capitalism is a zero sum game. The transition from socialism to capitalism, and globalization, and improvements in technology have lifted billions out of poverty. The globalization and technology came largely as a result of capitalism.

Thats an unsupported claim. I strongly disagree with all of it. Capitalism has hindered technology and improvements in the lives of billions of people. These improvments happened despite capitalism.

I did business years ago in a small, poor Asian country that went through an extended period of socialism. Singapore's per capita GDP adjusted for purchasing power is now 9X higher. The biggest difference is the economic system.

I don't know which country you speak about. But I am imagine the big difference is that Singapore was welcomed in the community of developed nations bcos it held many of the same values. Whereas the other country no doubt was ostracized. But again, as I said before, for every winner in capitalism, there must be untold losers. Thats how the model works. So gladly point to a winner, but also include all their losers too.

[Chris P]

Please explain the mechanism of socialism that will prevent or slow innovation?

Since Korea was split in two, which one has done better?

[Elvis 2008]

You were the one who didn't believe that Donnie the Dumbass didn't request that Twitter take down a post that was critical of him and insinuated that it didn't happen because I didn't provide links. Than, when I provided links, you come up with some bullshit what doesn't even pertain to what your issue was in the first place.

So I will ask you one more time. Did Donnie the Dumbass (or his minions) ask Twitter to take down a tweet that was critical of him? A simple YES or NO will suffice.

And here you go again with all the name calling. What is with you guys and Trump? You cannot quit him. As to your point, it already has been addressed better than I ever could by Matt Taibbi himself.

I did not see the story about Trump until yesterday. https://www.zerohedge.com/political/...banned-twitter.

However, as Taibbi notes, House hearings were held last week, at which one witness told a story about Donald Trump asking to remove a mean tweet by Chrissy Teigen.

The press went bananas. Now that was big news!

And so, Taibbi throws down the gauntlet in the latest 'Twitter Files', "purely to show the bankruptcy of media in this area".

If a president freaking out about one tweeter is news, surely a USA Senator finking on three hundred-plus of his constituents also must be?

The fact that mainstream outlets ignored the Schiff story but howled about Teigen shows what they're about.

Responses like this are designed to keep blue-leaning audiences especially focused on moronic partisan spats, obscuring bigger picture narratives.

The real story emerging in the #TwitterFiles is about a ballooning federal censorship bureaucracy that's not aimed at either the left or the right per se, but at the whole population of outsiders, who are being systematically defined as threats.

Beginning in March, we'll start using the Twitter Files to tell this larger story about how Americans turned their counterterrorism machinery against themselves, to disastrous effect, through little-known federal agencies like the Global Engagement Center (GEC).

End of link.

[Chris P]

And? I am unaware of any social media companies that do not have policies about derogatory remarks. The world is not being deprived of critical information when someone says someone else is a punk ass * I could care less if that post is kept up or not. Hell, you guys say worse about Trump all the time, and no one censors you.

Are you trying to equivocate this with the all right wing censorship and the stuff about 1-6, the vaccine, Covid, and Hunter Biden's laptop? Really?

Yes, they are trying to equate Twitter refusing to remove threats and derogatory insults to President Trump with Twitter (and Google and Facebook, collaborating as a RICO-style mafia) censoring, blocking and silencing evidence of criminal Biden family corruption directly before the election. Evidence which around 50% of people say would have swung their vote against Biden had they known about it.

Leftists are just wantonly disingenuous.

[Chris P]

So yeah, I do think capitalism is the answer but you have to do something to limit the power of the wealthy, you have to do something to protect the innovators, and that is just not being done. Sure, there are some things that should be in the hands of government for the public good, but you are not going to grow the pie with socialism. All the socialist talk IMO is because crony capitalism has taken over true capitalism and the less fortunate have been left out in the cold. They have no voice and no hope.

They had a voice, which was President Donald J. Trump. But he was literally silenced: denied the right to speak by fake news and big tech. However, in the spirit of the greatest American heroes, he is refusing to give up, and running yet again for his third presidential victory. Let us hope and pray that the disgusting Washington swamp deep state is unable to steal it from him this time.

[Chris P]

No, you are waiting with more dumb remarks. The virus mutated into a less potent form like Trump forecast. The vaccine was never proven to save lives although I am sure you can find a few thousand experts who can say that it did. But there is zero data to show that it did and in fact in the only double blind placebo controlled study, the vaccinated group had more deaths than the unvaccinated group.

Finally, we could through all the dumb things Biden said and did with covid like saying if you got vaccinated, you would not get Covid then Biden got vaccinated and got Covid himself. Duh!

Then there were all the dumb Biden mandates for a vaccine that did not prevent Covid transmission and all the stupid mandated Covid tests like when returning from traveling abroad that did nothing.

Good post. Particularly the last sentence. The entire world has realized it was all a bunch of BS and completely reopened, but the Biden regime is still insisting on its moronic covid regime when returning from abroad.

And that is just for US citizens whom they cannot keep out. Non-Americans still have to show their Orwellian so-called "vax passport" or they are denied entry. That's why Novak Djokovic wasn't able to play the US Open last fall, and it looks like this year too unless these clowns see sense (unlikely).

[Chris P]

That's totally insane! I read an article on the subject on a local television stations web site, and in addition to the 23 schools than had no students meeting minimum math standards, there were 20 more in which only one or two students met the minimum. And this is in Maryland, one of the most educated states in the country.

We need things like charter schools, vouchers for poor parents to use to fully pay for private schools, and teachers who produce results, whose first priority is their students instead of their unions. We've got all that where I live, a red city in a red county in a red state.

My sister-in-law is a bilingual teacher in my community. She takes kids who can't even speak English, and by the end of the first year, the majority of the kids are ahead of the English speakers. They don't have a problem with reading or math. She and her partner have to work 60 hours a week though to produce the results they do.

And I don't want to put all the blame on Democrats. Extending the expanded, refundable (you don't have to pay income taxes to use it) child care credit for truly needy families would be a good idea. Someone here, maybe PVMonger, pointed out a couple of red states where the poor school districts ended up with a lot less financial support than the wealthier ones. There's room for improvement there too.

Certain groups are always going to underperform as a whole for genetic reasons that we can't talk about here, but the situation is made much worse by democrat control of cities and teacher unions.

Your sister-in-law reminded me of an interesting high school principal in Britain whom I read and later watched a documentary about, called Katherine Birbalsingh.

Her school is in a black area of inner city London, with all the usual social problems one has come to expect from such places. All the nearby schools are absolute failures, like those in Baltimore. Yet her school is phenomenally successful. It has huge numbers of students accepted by top universities.

They are not allowed to select students on merit, so how does she achieve such good grades?

The answer is that she hates leftists. She even made a speech at the Conservative Party conference a few years ago. She lobbied for her school to be freed from the restraints of the Department of Education so that she could fire shitty teachers and impose restrictions on students. Students are required to wear uniform, walk quietly in line in the corridor, call the teachers 'sir' and 'ma'am' and thank them after each class.

Of course the left with all their wacko communist bullshit are melting down, but unfortunately for them her results are so good that every parent for miles around wants to enrol their kid in her school; and she is a non-white woman, so they can't deploy the usual shrieks of "racism" or "sexism."

Quite an interesting case. Unfortunately the wacko left big money donors and teachers unions are so entrenched that it could never happen in American inner cities, and so we will continue to see Baltimore all over the country regardless of how much taxpayer money they waste.

[PVMonger]

The writer appears to believe that the survey of state political reporters is the best measure of corruption. And on that list, seven of the top ten states voted for Biden.

Mississippi and Louisiana are small states. I bet there were many times more corruption convictions in Illinois, New York and California than MS and LA. And Mississippi and Louisiana suffer from a culture created by over 100 years of misrule, prior to 1965, by the Democratic Party.

Tooms is probably going to bring up a similar argument about Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and Monaco in another post I made this evening. And you'll probably agree with him while you disagree with me about Louisiana and Mississippi. You guys would have no problem understanding how the failure to segregate data by age groups blows away antivaxxers argument that the vaccines result in a higher probability of hospitalization from COVID. But when it comes to looking at literacy, corruption and homicide rates, your numeracy and analytical skills become sadly lacking.

Per capita corruption convictions in the US were higher in Louisiana than in IL, NY and CA. In fact, CA didn't even make the list of the top 10 most corrupt states in the US. https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmc...h=74d0b9532101.

[Tiny 12]

I think the Head-in-the-Sand posters' new "Ignore Feature" here is to whenever possible avoid directly challenging the inarguable facts that, for example, I post since they never have the facts on their side to refute them but to instead refer to me and what they cannot refute in safe replies to other posters who, they must assume, will not expect them to provide any substantiation for their lunatic assertions.

Sure looks that way to me anyway.

We've refuted your assertions with facts. Or at least shown that you cant blame every recession on Republicans and give credit for every recovery to Democrats, while ignoring the Fed, the business cycle, whats happening outside the USA, pandemics, etc. Another of your perennial favorites is providing a list of suck ass legislation passed on a bipartisan basis when a Democrat was president, and asking us to come up with a list of suck ass bills passed when a Republican was president.

You just keep making the same assertions over and over again. If you say something enough times it doesn't make it true. Yeah, we could keep correcting you, but it would be like the movie Groundhog Day. I'm willing to do that, keep repeating myself, for senile relatives. But you're not senile, just a bit stubborn, and not inclined to consider any facts, data or point of view that contradicts Democratic Party dogma.

You might consider bringing up a topic we havent already discussed. I for one will engage if its interesting to me.