outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

xpost Gottlieb is a little bullish on that compared to other experts, so I'm not 100% sure it will happen that fast.

this fuckin' guy:

As the majority of Florida's K-12 schools prepare to reopen campuses at full capacity this week — many of them on Tuesday — Gov. Ron DeSantis announced that the state Board of Education could withhold pay from school leaders who implement mask mandates for students.

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/08/09/1026299001/florida-governor-desantis-school-superintendent-salary-masks

I mean is this just fully ripping the mask off pure evil at this point? I want my citizens dead to please my twice impeached orange daddy hero?

he's a demon. and sadly there are other heads to this snake in other state Governors

Oh I know he's hardly the exception, just seems like he's not afraid to set the vanguard in pointless cruelty.

I mean, I'm no lawyer here and maybe he can't even actually have their pay withheld, but I'm sure just the threat is enough to keep superintendents in small districts and towns from doing the right thing this week. This shit infuriates me.

this fuckin' guy, pt. 2:

Breaking: Gov. Greg Abbott announces Texas will be seeking out-of-state health care personnel to help with the latest surge, and he is asking hospitals to voluntarily postpone elective medical procedures. pic.twitter.com/bNltNhYvT4

— Jesus Jiménez (@jesus_jimz) August 9, 2021

Dozens of Texas hospitals have run out of intensive care unit beds as COVID-19 surges faster than any other time during the pandemic, propelled by the new delta variant. https://t.co/HQgAy0W9rq

— Texas Tribune (@TexasTribune) August 10, 2021

yeah but self-reliance

just look after each other on an individual, private level like the lord intended

the amazing thing is that there are so many people who will outright tell you that none of this is actually happening. The fact that it is printed in any kind of newspaper is automatic proof that it's made up.

The most hilarious criticism I've seen is that newspapers are "plagiarizing" each other because they are printing similarly alarming stories based off the same facts and statistics.

It must be true, uh.

seriously, treating the fact that there are hundreds of news sources all telling the same story as proof of a giant conspiracy is the ultimate galaxy brain move, and there are a ton of people doing this right now.

propelled by the new delta variant

maybe they're not plagiarising hard enough!

On the plus side, sounds like lots of schools in Texas, including the entire Dallas public school system, is defying his ass hattery and requiring masks.

I saw a very compelling post arguing that the real bottleneck is not when you run out of beds but when you run out of nurses, which comes first.

Thursday Houston school district will vote on a mask mandate. We wrote all of our school board members and pushed calling on the school facebook groups.

Conservative parents on Facebook chimed in and I want to stab them in the face. I know where one of them lives and I couldn’t sleep for fantasizing about destroying his property.

“The public”

xp: calzino has posted some excellent tire-spiking advice somewhere on this board, if you choose to go that route.

There's plenty of data about nurses quitting, but as my husband works in the largest ER in Philadelphia, I can confirm through anecdata that nurses, techs, and CNAs are quitting at shocking rates.

I’d hoped to be done saying this long ago, but I’ll say it again now anyway: “What a time to be alive.”

never listen to alex berenson

― symsymsym, Monday, August 9, 2021 7:30 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

oh, for sure! i just found out who he was recently and was perplexed

not to like, be that guy, but actually in fact to be that guy, ime most kids and teenagers just will not wear their masks properly no matter what you do. if kids down to 12 y o can get vaxxed why not just require vaccinations to attend middle school and high school in person?

That's what I'd like to see happen, tbh.

those people "storming" the "bbc" "offices" yesterday would have a thing to say about this.

yeah, the kids would be denied choice in this, but the same is true of other vaccinations.

(there was a protest at television centre which the bbc very publicly moved out of in 2013. it's now posh flats and some studio space although I hear it's mainly used for Loose Women)

the indoor mask requirement was reinstated where i am so that applies to the gym too, which is very annoying, not only because i don't want to wear a mask in the gym, but also because adult men (interestingly no women or others with this issue HMMM) are not that much better than children at wearing masks so it feels pointless and i wish they would just require proof of vaccination.

https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2021/08/oregon-to-resume-statewide-indoor-mask-mandate-gov-kate-brown-says.html

The news gets worse and worse and worse -

- and yet a solid 60-70% of these yahoos in my area aren’t masking. It’s like they’ve never heard of Covid.

I actually went back to my gym for a good 3-4 weeks there, until 3-4 weeks ago when it started to not seem like the best idea.

wtf

The CDC just updated their numbers. They changed the weekend Florida numbers - but they still are different from what FLDOH released yesterday.
CDC:
Aug 9: 15,322
Aug 8: 19,584
Aug 7: 21,487
Aug 6: 23,958

FLDOH:
Aug 8: 15,319
Aug 7: 19,567
Aug 6: 21,500

— Brian Entin (@BrianEntin) August 10, 2021

xp

I had a similar experience. I was starting to get into a good routine with yoga classes, but it stopped feeling safe. I put my membership on hold for at least a month, and now my back feels like shit.

decompress er

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6m8GRbbfp5Y

This fucking country has just become completely unhinged. I hate it here.

The parking lot after a school board meeting last night in Franklin, the wealthiest place in Tennessee. Parents harassed medical professionals who had spoken in favor of masks in schools. “We know who you are. You can leave freely, but we will find you.” pic.twitter.com/SzR0uvMeE7

— Natalie Allison (@natalie_allison) August 11, 2021

fucking terrorists.

it's just too much.

the only language these assholes know is violence and god, am I wrong for wishing someone would just...give it to them? the permanent kind.

just send them to heaven, please god, exist and take your people home and leave the rest of us the fuck alone

worst heaven ever

"You tried to protect my children, fuck you! We're going to threaten your lives!"

And we're supposed to empathize and be patient with these fucking terrorists? Fuck off media. I'm so angry that this what we just have to accept now.

we do not have to accept that and have never had to accept it

I mean, we kind of are accepting it because it keeps happening? And they are getting absolutely zero pushback for this bullshit. There were cops present and afaik, no one was arrested for making these threats. It just keeps happening because there are zero consequences for this absurd bullshit.

I have nothing constructive to say about these people. They make me wish Marion Cobretti was real, is all, which as I say is unconstructive.

The good news is that the school board still decided to require masks in schools despite the pushback. They received more requests by email in favor of a mask mandate vs. against. It's not surprising that most of the people who chose to attend the meeting in person were loony anti-maskers.

I mean, we kind of are accepting it because it keeps happening? And they are getting absolutely zero pushback for this bullshit. There were cops present and afaik, no one was arrested for making these threats. It just keeps happening because there are zero consequences for this absurd bullshit.

― a superficial sheeb of intelligence (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Wednesday, August 11, 2021 12:36 PM (forty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

The lack of consequences should be everyone's takeaway from the Trump era - his followers certainly get it.

It's depressingly true.

the lack of consequences if you're white and cis

very sneaky, cis

the previous era was kind of the grungy, nirvana/pixies loud-soft thing with white supremacy. but in then in the run-up to the trump years, there was a lot more "saying the quiet part loud", which created the current "saying everything loud" era

now there's a Donne-worthy conceit

Zeynap is right-on, as usual:

There’s long been an idea that a key problem with digital media has been the echo-chambers it produces, where we only encounter people like us who affirm our beliefs. That’s not false in that we tend to find people like us online, but that’s incomplete—if anything we are even more isolated offline in the United States.

Digital media doesn’t just isolate groups; rather, it helps tribalize us even further. We certainly encounter “the other” online, but usually in caricature form. We seek out these cartoonish people and positions regardless of how frequently they actually occur or what else might be happening.

Both traditional media and social media helps produce the stories, algorithms amplify it, and platforms and media all get an audience out of it, and as individuals we can get attention (from virality) and an outlet for our anger and sense of helplessness.