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Faceplams: we live in a very unfortunate society where people are either uneducated or easily manipulated...one can say those are one in the same, but I digress.Originally Posted by Kodiak33
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we live in a very unfortunate society where people are either uneducated or easily manipulated...one can say those are one in the same, but I digress.
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I had to make sure this wasn't a subscriber article before posting:
The problem of Hillsong & Stephen Harmon
Hi,
I want to talk a little about Hillsong Church — the megachurch started in Australia in 1983 by Brian Houston and his wife Bobbie. The church got big — really big — spreading to the United States and beyond, its adherents including Justin Bieber and Chris Pratt.
I’ve always been fascinated by this cult, and it was in the headlines over the weekend when one of its members died from Covid.
Bite me
Stephen Harmon’s Twitter feed still haunts me.
Sure, it was easy for most of the Twitterverse to write Harmon off as an idiot anti-vaxxer who “deserved what he had coming,” etc.
But Harmon was suffering, asking for prayers, terrified. He was being advised that he had to be intubated - and therefore put under anesthesia - but due to the latter, he refused intubation, he stated due to wanting to maintain his own “choice.” But, it was obvious that it was due to fear. Total fear. He was asking followers to pray for him, he was asking God for strength and guidance.
His last tweet, he says he finally acquiesced to being intubated; he would, therefore, be unconscious for an undetermined time, but hoped to see people later.
He, of course, never recovered or regained consciousness; he died the next day.
Watching this unfold, watching a young man suffer the symptoms of Covid - the uncontrollable blood pressure spikes, the temperature spikes, the panic attacks, the difficulty breathing - and watching him face his mortality due to this illness, and deal with the consequences of his decisions … it’s still pretty unsettling and heartbreaking, even if I can’t understand these people.
May he Rest In Peace.
And may his death be a lesson.
Last edited by allegro; 07-26-2021 at 10:26 PM.
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I don't want to turn this into a whole religious debate, but...it drives me nuts when people assume that just praying for everything to be fine is all that it takes. There's an arrogance in believing that you're the one who is going to be bestowed with a miracle when many others haven't. When you do that, it's just taking personal responsibility and accountability out of the equation. Then it becomes "god's will". "Nobody is to blame! It was god's will for him to die!" Was it? I thought he was praying REALLY hard for a miracle and denying that awful, awful vaccine. Why wasn't he spared the pain he went through?
He's absolutely right about making his own choice, but in making that choice, he is responsible for what happened to him. End of story.
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^^
As the punchline to the joke goes:
"I sent you a boat... I sent you a helicopter...."
I was nobody. Nothing.
What's REALLY awesome is when kids get cancer, and certain churches tell their families, and the congregation, that the child died because the family didn't pray hard enough, or "have enough faith."
Just tickles my balls!
Our lockdown has been extended for another month, good times. Mutation. Feels all right.
I was nobody. Nothing.
Damn dude.
Bite me
That's true. But, watching these people die, in real time on Twitter, due to their own stubbornness and stupidity, doesn't make it any less awful. It's like watching people sink on the Titanic while you're on a lifeboat, and those people had refused to get onto the lifeboat, and you're watching them scream and cry and drown. It's still horrible, even if they made their own choice.
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God is an American
Read more about this here, if there is still any lingering confusion. Perhaps you were waiting for Dr. Fauci to respond and didn't hear anything because Paul's team of media handlers edited out the response to purposely confuse you.
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I love that companies are mandating vaccines (which they have the right to do) .
We need to see construction, police, firefighters, and teachers do the same across the country....
24.24.2.2866
and staff at fucking seniors residences.
as per this story, his 95 year old father in Florida is now sick with COVID because of some unvaccinated prick and i am sure there are an endless supply of instances just like this.
https://medium.com/whither-news/some...k-161d9b98a204
Yesterday, we spoke with someone at his complex about his future care. We expressed utter dismay that half the staff there could be unvaccinated. How could anyone be so irresponsible when they are caring for old people? The people we were speaking with agreed. But they said that if they required the vaccine, in a tight labor market they’d end up short-staffed.
Excuses. Everybody is making excuses when they should be showing responsibility and leadership. We should be requiring vaccinations for the good of all. We should be shunning the people who refuse vaccinations. This is now their pandemic, the pandemic of the unvaccinated. They are ignorant, selfish, irresponsible, cynical, dangerous, deadly.
They gave our dear father COVID. Damn them.
I was nobody. Nothing.
Thank you. That explains THAT. Rand Paul is a stain on his father's legacy. I'm ultimately a left libertarian, and even though American "libertarianism" requires an asterisk, Ron had a FEW ideas I liked.
BUT: that STILL doesn't explain why we were working on DEADLY PATHOGEN research with fucking CHINA.
God is an American
Well, that's where a lot of the novel zoonotic viruses have recently emerged. Makes sense to fund research on them close to the source. I get that there are reservations about working with the CCP, that's totally understandable, but at the end of the day these are scientists. If we don't put all of our best and brightest to work together on a species-wide collective effort — across our imaginary political borders — on this problem, the next virus to emerge could make SARS-CoV-2 look like a sniffle and just wipe us all out.
I was nobody. Nothing.
What you're describing, this species wide collective effort? I REALLY don't think it's possible at this stage of evolution.
In the distant future, Homo Sapiens will likely be regarded as brutal and savage: and that's IF, like you said, anyone survives TO evolve.
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Good article from the Seattle Times:
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle...-unvaccinated/
This COVID sequel is maddening. Time to flip the script and up the pressure on the unvaccinated.
July 31, 2021 at 6:00 am Updated July 31, 2021 at 1:16 pm
A registered nurse fills syringes with Pfizer vaccines at a COVID-19 vaccination clinic at PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center on June 3 in Bellingham. (Elaine Thompson / AP)
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Here we go again.
Masks are supposed to go back on. Some businesses are being forced to close. Hospitals, at least in some parts of the state, have begun to warn about jammed emergency rooms.
“It’s déjà vu all over again,” said Reza Kaleel, a hospital executive in the Tri-Cities — right now the state’s hottest COVID hot spot. A delta variant outbreak there has caused a disheartening “fifth wave,” filling the local ICU this past week to the point that patients had to be medevaced out of town.
“The hardest thing for us to see, as health professionals, is that this is entirely preventable,” Kaleel said.
This past month when I wrote that “Washington had its chance to stomp the coronavirus, but we blew it,” a lot of readers objected.
Some didn’t like the royal “we.”
“ ‘We’ didn’t blow it,” a doctor from Snohomish wrote in. “Other areas of the state have done very well, with high vaccination rates and low infection rates. It’s an amazing success story, actually.”
Others wrote that they were done with the idea of “we.”
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“I’m vaxxed so I guess I don’t worry about it anymore,” one wrote. “If you had the chance to get vaccinated and didn’t take it, and then you end up in the hospital, that’s on you.”
Others felt it’s all fundamentally nobody’s business (or at least none of mine).
“Since when were you anointed to rule over Eastern Washington?” wrote a man who insisted he had picked up my column only because he was passing the time at a store waiting for his wife. “Vaccinations here in Walla Walla or anywhere in this state are really none of your business.”
Well let’s check in on Walla Walla, shall we? Since then, the COVID case rate has shot up by another 37% (it was already one of the highest on the West Coast). This past week, a hospital in town asked people not to come to the emergency room unless they are having “a heart attack, stroke, trouble breathing, severe bone breaks, etc.”
“There is a higher likelihood of being air transferred to another facility, particularly for an intensive care bed,” the health director warned.
This sure sounds like somebody’s business. What’s happening now in this infuriating COVID sequel — the mask redux, bars closing due to mini-outbreaks, businesses delaying their returns to offices — is exactly what I meant when I said “we” had blown it. This societywide failure to contain the pandemic is going to touch you one way or another, even if you are vaccinated so that the disease itself may not.
At a briefing in the Tri-Cities, doctors were reduced to morosely begging their community to get vaccinated — to no apparent avail. After all this time and effort, Benton County is hovering at 47% of the eligible population vaccinated, while Franklin County has only 40%.
“There’s this lack of trust in science and our health care experts — it’s something I haven’t seen in my career before,” said Dr. Kevin Pieper of Kadlec Medical Center in Richland, where COVID hospitalizations have surged fourfold since June and are now back to the peak from last winter.
Kaleel, the administrator, said the hospital staff is demoralized by the “unending procession” of COVID waves and lockdowns. He’s now worried he won’t be able to recruit new doctors or nurses to “a community that continues to have a very low vaccination rate, knowing what they’re going to have to contend with here.”
The biggest concern, he said, is the unvaccinated population may percolate “mutations of the virus beyond this delta variant that may prove to be more resistant to the vaccines, and keep us all in this cycle.”
This was the most depressing briefing I’ve attended in the pandemic yet. They kept repeating how pointless and easily preventable it all is.
So what are we going to do now — now that we blew our chance to stomp the pandemic?
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The other day a KING 5 news anchor, Jake Whittenberg, asked: “Serious question … Where’s the effort to make the unvaccinated feel more comfortable about getting the shot, rather than just making them feel guilty?” Asked what people are objecting to, he said: “They’re uncomfortable with government telling them what to do.”
A good debate followed, but here’s the thing: Up till now, government hasn’t told anybody what to do — yet. They’ve made the shots free and easy to get. They dangled beer, lottery drawings, even free topsoil(!). They begged. On Thursday President Biden backed the once radical idea of paying people to get vaxxed.
The one thing they haven’t done is make anybody do anything.
That’s where I suspect we’re headed. Persuasion hasn’t worked. Hospitalization and death don’t seem to move the needle. The only thing left to try is to raise the costs and hassle of staying unvaccinated (for those who can medically take the vaccines, of course).
It’s why businesses increasingly are saying: Get vaxxed or you can’t work (there’s usually an out where you can take regular coronavirus tests instead). Or, as at some Seattle businesses, “no vaccine, no service.”
“I have a relative who won’t get vaccinated, but if you told her she couldn’t go to Costco, she’d be at CVS that same day with her sleeve rolled up,” one reader wrote me.
Exactly. It’s the American version of what they did in France, where you now have to show a “vaccine passport” to go to a Parisian cafe.
I’m not a fan of forced vaccination. Requiring vaccination to do certain things though, that’s a step shy of a hard mandate (especially if you can show a negative test as an alternative). But it’s a ratcheting up of pressure, which now seems sadly needed to halt the making of still more bad COVID sequels (sure to come this fall: Part VI, The Coviding).
As the weary doctors in the Tri-Cities testified the other day, we could have done this the easy way. But “we” chose not to — by which I mean, enough of us to rope in all of us. So the hard way it’s going to be.
Last edited by chuckrh; 08-01-2021 at 02:08 AM.
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Oh, that's good. I hope it was intentional.Hospitalization and death don’t seem to move the needle.
Fuck you Jake. how about that?Jake Whittenberg, asked: “Serious question … Where’s the effort to make the unvaccinated feel more comfortable about getting the shot, rather than just making them feel guilty?”
God is an American
Hope you're wrong homie <3
I was nobody. Nothing.
I think I should cowboy up and get vaccinated before my trip to.Denver. My wife and I are sick enough every day as it is, and worry about side effects on TOP of that. And we pretty much like, don't leave the house.
But I suppose it'd be better than a nasty case of covid.
Last edited by elevenism; 08-02-2021 at 12:48 AM.
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There is part of me that's wondering if all of us having COVID will somehow be inevitable given the delta variant. Breakthrough cases in fully vaccinated are on the rise.
I guess survival will come down to whether or not your immune system works well with the vaccine to prevent hospitalization.
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No...not the Delta varient Magnetic, but the variant that is about two mutations away. If we don't get it together by then (and it's not looking like we will... ) then we are really screwed, back to March of 2020. But maybe worse.
Too Privileged to Get It
This is pretty much how it was always going to go, because historically that's how viruses behave. No amount of mitigation, no matter how responsible the population might be, is ever 100% proof against infection. The difference all comes down to how strong your immune system is either naturally or through being bolstered by a working vaccine. If you haven't gotten infected yet, you will, someday. Heck, more people have probably already been infected and they never knew it because their systems fought it off better than others. We have no idea how many people had it and were truly asymptomatic.There is part of me that's wondering if all of us having COVID will somehow be inevitable given the delta variant. Breakthrough cases in fully vaccinated are on the rise.
I guess survival will come down to whether or not your immune system works well with the vaccine to prevent hospitalization.
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Bite me
This doesn't worry me too much, personally, as I think I may have already had it, and I'm fairly healthy, etc. But it's my 83-yr-old Mom I'm worry about.There is part of me that's wondering if all of us having COVID will somehow be inevitable given the delta variant. Breakthrough cases in fully vaccinated are on the rise.
I guess survival will come down to whether or not your immune system works well with the vaccine to prevent hospitalization.
So, we've been back to wearing masks everywhere, and never eating indoors, again. She's moving in with us by the end of August, so now we'll have to be EXTRA vigilant.
We've had construction workers in our house who are all vaccinated but now we have painters showing up and I don't know anything about them, so now we'll have to start wearing masks around them.
It's inevitable that we'll have to live like this for, really, years. That there will likely be a few million dead by the time this gets even close to winding down.
Last edited by allegro; 08-02-2021 at 05:19 PM.
Bite me
Just tickles my balls!
We’re basically back to March 2020 down here in New South Wales right now, if not worse. It’s starting to feel like the second extinction of the dinosaurs.
(Unused symbol)
^^ this happens every year in parts of Cali and Colorado. It’s endemic to that part of the country.
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